Chocolate Always Loves You Back
by Tierfal
Summary: Light Yagami is not having a good Valentine's Day. Between the new guy with the candy fetish, his partner, Matsuda, and the unsettling new case... the chocolate may be the only thing that loves him at all. Light/L.
1. SweeTarts Hearts

_Author's Note: AU. L had a (relatively) normal upbringing, and Light obviously isn't Kira… The ages are different… BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! You just have to read it to find out what that is. XD_

_It's still Valentine's Day in my time zone, damn it. XD Sorry the chapter's short; I… haven't written the rest, which is creative suicide by my muse's rules, but today was busy, and I was rushing to get _something_ done. I may, um, edit this a little later. Enjoy, and I'll try to update soon, though I can't make any promises!_

**

* * *

CHOCOLATE ALWAYS LOVES YOU BACK**

I. SweeTarts Hearts

Light was frowning and resisting the urge to chew on the end of his pen.

There was nothing more disgusting than being handed a pen that looked like a golf ball for the teethmarks, the tip of which was still damp from somebody's saliva.

It was horribly tempting, however, to ignore all tenets of writing utensil decorum in favor of masticating the thing to little plastic pieces as he strode down the long hall towards Matsuda's office, reading and rereading the mystifying file.

He settled for tapping the thing against his lips, which was a whole lot less revolting, and squinting at the small type.

Vaguely, he heard someone moving towards him, and he stepped blindly rightward to clear the path, assuming the prospective problem would be resolved.

The footsteps' owner, however, did the same thing, and a cataclysmic collision resulted.

Copy paper, paperclips, crime scene photos, and small pastel projectiles flew everywhere, exploding into the air and raining down on the carpet. More than one tiny, brightly-colored object ricocheted off of Light's head where he was sprawled on the floor after crashing into—he focused his dazed eyes to look—someone he'd never seen around here before.

The individual across from him was already crouched on the floor, long-fingered hands darting out to recapture heart-shaped pieces of candy, which he snatched between two fingers to toss back into his cardboard box. The object of Light's scrutiny was a young man with wildly unkempt black hair, tangled sections of which effectively hid his forehead and his ears, jutting out behind his head and brushing against his shoulders, which were hunched almost defensively. Behind the uneven bangs glimmered huge gray eyes, triple-underlined with dark circles that spoke volumes of sleeplessness and exaggerated the stormy color of the irises even more. The man's skin was drastically pale, and he looked ill-at-ease in his white Oxford shirt and slightly wrinkled navy blue slacks—as if he ought to be wearing something much more casual, a hypothesis bolstered by the way the first three buttons of his shirt hung heedlessly undone.

He was also wearing black flip-flops.

Light felt justified in staring where he sat dumbly on the carpet, his once-orderly manila folder somewhere off to his left, dotted with little candies.

And then Light's not-yet-acquaintance did something that made it impossible to stay silent: the man popped one of the candy hearts absently into his mouth.

Light made a face, and the gray eyes met his, a pink tongue poking out to swipe sugar from the closest lip.

"What?" the oddity asked.

"You're eating off the _floor_," Light responded stupidly, too distracted by the thought of the swarming bacteria to say anything more intelligent.

"Yes," the other man confirmed slowly.

"People _walk_ all over this floor," Light persisted—pointlessly, he had realized.

The man selected another candy and set it on his tongue. "I do this consistently," he noted. "My immune system is accustomed to it. Besides, these were on sale this morning, because of the holiday. SweeTarts Hearts are one of my favorites."

Light blinked—and then he made the conscious decision to extricate himself from this sudden and inexplicable insanity.

"Good for you," he declared, clambering to his feet and seeking out the scattered sheets of his case file. "Now, if you'll excuse me…"

Jamming the papers back into the folder, he picked his way through the remaining candy—because as much as he disapproved of eating off the floor, there was no real reason to make it _worse_ for the lunatic by stepping on the stuff directly—and continued down the hall.

His senior partner/quasi-mentor, Matsuda, for all his foibles, was kind enough to observe the tacit NPA dress code—his tie, while it _did_ sport a motif of cheerful red hearts, at least was straight and even.

Matsuda flipped through the file, the line between his brows deepening.

"This is awful," he muttered, doe eyes alternating mournful regret and righteous outrage. "To kill a child this way. Ten years at this, and I still can't believe how _sick_ some people are."

He paused, turned a leaf, and turned back.

"You're missing one," he announced.

Light shook himself from vindictive thoughts about crushing SweeTarts beneath his heel. "What?"

"You're missing a page," Matsuda repeated. "It skips from six to eight."

Light scowled. "I crashed into a guy in the hallway. I must not have seen it picking up the others. Hey, who _is_ that guy? Black hair, never met the sun, some kind of candy maniac or something…"

Matsuda smiled, eyebrows rising amusedly. "That would be Lawliet," he explained. "He's the new guy—super-genius hotshot straight out of college. Brilliant, eccentric habits aside." He grinned. "Kind of like you."

Light gave him a sardonic look. "I don't eat off the _floor_."

"But you _do_ line up your pens in alphabetical order by brand name."

Light felt a faint flush creeping into his cheeks and fought it back. "…I didn't think anyone would notice that," he managed.

Matsuda closed the file and handed it back, smiling. "I'm a detective, Light," he pointed out. "I notice things. Find that missing page for me?"

Sighing, Light went to scour the hallway.

—

His efforts were fruitless.

And candyless; this Lawliet character had found every single fallen SweeTart, leaving nothing behind.

Gritting his teeth, Light proceeded down the hall the way Lawliet had been going and tracked down a puff of unruly black hair bent over a desk. Looked like the newbie was working with Aizawa, which would hopefully teach him a thing or two about civilized conduct.

Light approached. Substantiating his addiction theory, there was a huge dish of candy on Lawliet's desk, the bowl brimming with heart-shaped chocolates in red and gold foil, neon-wrapped lollipops, pink Hershey's kisses, and loose conversation hearts. Salvaged SweeTarts were spread over the desktop by the madman's right hand, and he paused in filling out sections of a complicated form to tuck candies between his lips at intervals.

Light cleared his throat, and Lawliet looked up, gray eyes unperturbed and unblinking.

He regarded his form again. "Take some candy," he said.

It was more an order than an offer, and Light bristled.

"I'm fine," he responded crisply.

"Really," Lawliet countered, "have something. Dark chocolate is actually good for you. Additionally, I prefer to deal with people whose brains are flooded with endorphins."

Light crossed his arms and set his jaw. "I'm _fine_," he said again. "I just came to ask if you have the missing page from my case file, because it wasn't in the hallway."

Lawliet glanced up from his work again. "Take some candy," he retorted, "and I'll see if I can find it."

Fists clenching automatically as his blood began to boil, Light opened his mouth to tell this arrogant piece of sh… _work_ where to shove his Hershey's kisses—and then realized firstly that Aizawa was sitting two feet away, watching him with a cynical, interested half-smile; and secondly that upturning a bowl of candy on the new guy's head was not the way to demonstrate his professionalism.

He selected a Dove chocolate, meticulously peeled off the foil, and stuck it in his mouth.

He'd better be getting some antioxidants out of this deal.

Lawliet smirked and opened the desk drawer on the top right.

"Hey," Mogi's voice called from behind him. Light looked over his shoulder, sucking on the chocolate. "Who's working on the Sander case?" Light turned fully to say that it had fallen to him and Masuda and found the remarkably solid detective ceasing to wave a hand for attention—and utilizing it instead to point at the trio of children at his side.

"It's mine and Matsu's," Light volunteered, dodging desks to cross the room. He stared down at Mogi's new friends. "Who are they?"

The leader—or so Light gathered from the boy's unrepentantly aggressive stance—was a grubby-faced blond with icy blue eyes, but before he could snap out what would almost certainly have been an insult, Mogi cut in.

"They're friends of Sander's," he explained. "Or, rather, they _were_."

Light took in the other two—a gangly kid with a strange, worn pair of goggles pushed up into his scruffy red hair and a tiny boy dressed in grimy pajamas, his hair and skin white, his huge eyes an ashen gray. He looked like a plant that had grown in the dark.

"What are they doing here?" Light demanded.

Mogi shrugged. "They're scared," he reported. "Whoever killed Sander might be after them, too."

"Plus we like tryin' to make people miserable," the blond muttered. "Second-favorite hobby."

Light resisted the urge to massage his temples. He had the feeling they were going to succeed.

He realized that he'd crushed the chocolate wrapper in his hand and looked at it idly.

_Chocolate,_ it promised, _always loves you back._

He was really hoping the universe at large was feeling the same way.


	2. Trouble

_Author's Note: An update only two weeks later! What a COUP!_

…_that was sarcasm. XD I'm really sorry about the huge delay; I've been working on everything BUT this fic, and I regret to report that I have no idea when it will be updated next. XD  
_

_In other news, you may credit the very lovely fic "Of Music" by Mikanis for making the workplace arena so terribly enticing to write about, and you may worship the inimitable Eltea for plotting out a mystery for me and betaing wonderfully. :)_

_And I hadn't decided yet last time, but I can now say with all certainty that this fic is set in San Francisco, California. XD_

_Please note as well that the rating has been changed to T! I have no idea what possessed me to make it so low in the first place, but there you go. XD  
_

* * *

II. Trouble

The blond looked interestedly at the wrapper cradled in Light's palm, cold blue eyes lighting up.

"Where'd you get the chocolate?" he wanted to know.

"There—" the redhead supplied, motioning towards Lawliet's desk.

"Jackpot" was the verdict, and the blond was off like a thoroughbred from the starting gate, his pair of sidekicks not far behind.

Light shot a sardonic look at Mogi, who raised broad shoulders in an eloquent shrug.

Sighing inwardly, Light followed the closest thing they had so far to a lead, pitching the stupid foil into someone's wastebasket as he strode by.

He _was_ a little curious as to whether the blond's given name was "Chaos" or "Trouble."

Chaos-Trouble was, as Light approached, quite contentedly engrossed in the arduous process of cramming Valentine's Day chocolates into his mouth. His companions were less hastily following suit, and Light almost literally stumbled as the thought struck him—they were eating as though they hadn't for a while.

This wasn't what he'd signed up for when he got his badge.

All right, maybe it was, but there hadn't been anything in the contract about snarky starving children becoming crucial to your investigation. The rule book had managed to leave that part out.

It was a grave oversight.

"Yeah," Trouble was announcing to a receptive Lawliet through a mouthful of chocolate, "we're here 'cause of Sander."

The redhead murmured in agreement around a lollipop. "We kinda knew him, so…"

The white-haired boy was shifting his weight, looking like he didn't want to be on his feet, and stacking the conversation hearts that he had lined up by color. "As much as we know anyone," he contributed.

Lawliet was dangling a familiar piece of case file by its corner, which he'd trapped between his first two fingers. He admired it bemusedly as he monitored the systematic exhaustion of his candy supply.

"The whole situation sounds very unpleasant," he noted.

Light was pretty sure Lawliet was the most unpleasant thing in _this_ room.

Pointedly, he cleared his throat, and Lawliet pretended to notice him for the first time.

"Your evidence is hungry, Yagami-kun," Lawliet remarked.

Light automatically moved to ask the obvious question, but he remembered in the nick of time that his identification was all over the page of the case report that trailed from Lawliet's grip. The guy was observant, but he wasn't a psychic.

Which was nice, since Light _really_ didn't think he could have handled that today.

Lawliet's decision to tack on the honorific, however, was tantamount to plunging a hot needle into Light's skin—it had been almost five years since he had moved from Tokyo to northern California, and the American immigration laws' red tape was doing an excellent job of reinforcing his Outsider status without any help from uppity up-and-comers who didn't like his accent.

He resolved to take the high road and turned to Mogi. "Can you get Matsuda?" he asked.

Honestly, Mogi should have punched him in the kidney and told him where to shove it—or at least refused to go until he said "please"—but the guy just offered a good-natured nod and complied.

If only everyone was so kind.

Light turned reluctantly to the trio of ravenous dynamos.

"I'm going to need to speak to all of you in the witness room," he informed them.

Color-Coder and the Aviator blinked at him unconcernedly; Trouble ostensibly ignored him until another chocolate wrapper had bounced off of the wastebasket rim.

"What for?" he demanded. "What're you gonna give us?"

Light Yagami was about to bargain with a homeless, chocoholic, prepubescent spitfire of questionable sanity.

This just wasn't his day.

"A place to live," Lawliet answered before Light had a chance to speak.

Light was getting awfully tired of staring incredulously at this guy, but it didn't look like he'd be stopping any time soon.

"Are you—" he began. He didn't _care_ how wretched and malnourished these pitiable specimens of humanity were; they were _not_ setting their filthy feet in _his_ apartment.

"My uncle has been lonely lately," Lawliet interrupted calmly, "now that I've finished school and commenced a full-time career—empty nest and so on. I imagine he would be delighted to acquire a few new troublemakers."

"He must be quite the masochist," Light muttered.

"Or he actually cares about other human beings," Lawliet returned idly.

Light was not going to rise to that either.

Well, not in front of a newly-arrived Matsuda and three unnaturally-attentive children.

What was _with_ those kids, anyway?

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," Matsuda greeted the boys, holding a hand out to Trouble to shake. "I'm Touta Matsuda, and I'm hoping you can help us find out what happened to Sander."

Warily, the blond accepted Matsuda's hand. "I'm Mello," he said. "And this is Matt and Near."

Matsuda finished introductions and pushed his hands into his pockets. "Do you think you can help us?" he inquired.

The three exchanged meaningful glances.

"Only," Mello, ever the spokesman, declared, "if we get to go home with _him_." A skinny finger stabbed towards the personification of disorder on the other side of the candy bowl, a SweeTart heart raised halfway to his mouth.

For the first time, Light glanced over at Aizawa sitting at the adjoining desk. The man had one hand over his mouth, and barely-contained mirth danced like fireworks in his eyes. Never in the record of human history had anyone had to try so hard not to laugh.

Light couldn't blame him—this was a _farce_.

—

It was very aggravating that the boys' uniformly unwavering eyes made him feel like he had come before a panel of unsympathetic judges—it was kind of supposed to be the other way around.

They sat in a row across the table, Mello still popping chocolates like a drug addict (a comparison that made Light shiver despite himself—for who could say what a few years might let chocolate become?), Matt having moved on to his third lollipop, and Near with one knee drawn to his chest as he crafted strange mosaic-like designs with Mello's discarded wrappers.

Light folded his hands on the tabletop, trying not to notice Matsuda pacing thoughtfully behind him. The pair of them were a textbook case of Good Cop/Bad Cop. Or at least Good Cop/Irritable and Impatient Cop, which generally turned out to mean Bad Cop in the long run.

He really needed to work on that.

As it was, he tried to look Mello in the eyes, which was not as easy task given that the boy was avoiding his gaze. Eye contact, like arguments, agreements, and the tango, took two participants.

"You knew Sander?" he prompted.

"That's a leading question," Mello decided.

"This isn't a courtroom," Light informed him. "You're not even _witnesses_, per se, and we're not holding you—you came here of your own volition, you may recall. We're just trying to figure out why someone would do something like this—and who did, and how we can take them into custody and make this city that much safer for everyone."

Matsuda clapped him on the shoulder. "This, friends," he declaimed, "is why Mister Light Yagami has always dreamed of a career in law enforcement. He was pursuing justice before he was potty-trained. Nursery school criminals fled in terror."

Mello snickered, Near smiled faintly, and Matt gave a nervous giggle.

There was their in.

Damn if Matsuda wasn't good at this.

"Matt," Light's cheerful partner went on, "I hear you were friends with Sander, is that right?"

Matt toyed with his lollipop. "Kinda. Just… it's mostly small groups out there, you know. It's the three of us, and Sander hangs out with other guys, but we run into them sometimes, and we've worked the crowds together with them before. Sander's—Sander _was_—real friendly, so—y'know."

Near bulldozed an elaborate foil geometry with both hands, scattering the pieces, and then delicately began to rearrange them, one hand rising to twirl a finger into his pale hair.

"Sander is short for Lysander," he volunteered. "Morris is the surname. He told me once. People tell me things."

People probably did. Near looked fantastically harmless, so much so that it completely concealed what Light gauged as a very considerable intelligence indeed.

"Can I have more chocolate?" Mello cut in, dropping a handful of wrappers in front of Near.

Light opened his mouth to ask just how many hollow limbs the boy possessed, but Matsuda preempted him by tossing more heart-shaped chocolates onto the table.

"Don't make yourself sick," he cautioned. "They're not going anywhere, so there's no rush, okay?"

Mello chewed on his lip, sizing Matsuda up critically.

"What's your game?" he wanted to know.

Matsuda grinned. "What," he responded, "a guy can't just believe in mankind?"

Mello raised an eyebrow.

Matsuda resumed a search of his pockets and turned up four more chocolates and two lollipops, which he set on the table by their predecessors. "Guy also gets a bonus if he figures it out faster," he explained.

Matt frowned, and then he muttered, "C'mon, Mel."

Mello bristled. "Shut _up_, Matt," he shot back.

Light seized the trailing thread.

"What is it, Matt?" he pressed gently. "If it's important, we need to know."

Matt squirmed under Mello's glare and said nothing.

"Mello saw Sander's body before the police did," Near piped up distractedly, maneuvering a scrap of gold foil into place.

"I _hate_ you!" Mello snarled.

"Which you wouldn't've stopped doing if I'd stayed quiet," Near noted.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Matsuda interjected before Mello could construct any weapons of retaliation out of candy wrappers.

There was a pause.

"Who would've listened?" Matt asked into it, smiling a little.

"Mello was scouting around the restaurants and the alleys that day," Near told them idly. "Matt and I stayed close to home with the hats."

For once, it was hard for Light to extract the relevant case information from the biography. The image Near presented—the thought of three thin, dirty boys dividing the labor and defending their turf, begging passersby and raiding trashcans for bits and pieces to cobble together into survival… It was Near's matter-of-factness that unsettled him most of all—this was habit for them. It was natural. It was systematic, and it was their world.

They wouldn't have wanted his pity, but they would have used it against him in a second.

"But later you got scared," Matsuda filled in quietly, "and today you came here."

Mello scowled. "Wouldn't you?" he demanded.

Matsuda smiled sadly. "If I saw a little boy lying in an alleyway, dead, bruised almost beyond recognition, and cut open from collarbone to pelvis? Yes, Mello, I would."

Mello was a little paler now, stranded in the flat glow of the fluorescent light.

"I just didn't want it to happen to any of us," he muttered, "is all."

"You made the right decision," Light assured him. "What do you know about Sander? Did you see anything unusual around him, or anyone leaving when you found the corpse? Did he have enemies?"

"No," Matt murmured, fidgeting. "Nobody really cares about us, you know? I mean—sometimes people get mad at us, like it's our fault we make them feel bad for having money or food or a house or whatever, but we really don't bother anybody."

Light looked to Matsuda, who shrugged.

"But no one really bothers you, either, do they?" Light hazarded. "Is it possible Sander was somewhere he shouldn't have been and saw something he wasn't supposed to see?"

"If that was the case," Near replied, eyes on his project, "the mutilation could have been a distraction."

Matsuda drummed his fingers on his chin. "When do we get the autopsy, Light?"

Light glanced at his watch and noticed out of the corner of his eye that Mello's gaze was on it.

"Should be within the hour," he answered.

Matsuda sighed. "All right." He set his hands on the table and addressed the boys again. "So you're going to stay with Lawliet?"

There was a great deal of emphatic nodding.

Matsuda had another question: "Do you want to help us solve this case?"

Light stared at him.

"Matsuda," he protested, "they're _children_!"

"Children," Matsuda replied, "who know the ups and downs of this city better than we do. We've got to use our resources, Light."

The triumvirate was consulting, silently again.

That was just creepy.

Matt and Near sat back to let Mello speak for them.

"Since we'll be at Lawliet's anyway," he declared, "you can come ask us about stuff."

Light fought the urge to roll his eyes.

"Or," Mello suggested, "he could bring us here with him every day."

Light raked his hands through his hair, trying not to give up on humanity entirely.

There was no winning with these people.


	3. Pacific Heights

_Author's Note: William Golding was going to put him in _Lord of the Flies_, but he realized that "Quill" would have destroyed Jack with his mind within the first fifty pages. In the interest of sustaining the plot, he changed his mind._

_On another note (GEDDIT??), Wikipedia is my liiiiife. True story._

_I was up until three Thursday getting this ready to update yesterday, but the site failed me yet again. In any case, biweekly updating isn__'t anything to write home about, but it__'s looking like I can be consistent with it, which counts for something. Maybe? XD_

_Proper editing? To hell with that! Logic? I DON__'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS!  
_

* * *

III. Pacific Heights

"_Really_?"

Mello's eyes were saucer-sized, and they sparked with an awe that verged on ridiculous in the early-evening sun that infiltrated the window on the far wall.

Lawliet nodded. "I've always enjoyed problem-solving, and there were more than enough problems—the police generally didn't mind sharing with a college student going into law enforcement."

"I imagine you had to prove yourself before they accepted your assistance," Near murmured, and a loitering Light wondered despite himself how the boy found so many dictionaries to eat out there on the streets.

Lawliet smiled, slightly wryly. "Three times," he confirmed. "They felt terribly usurped until they realized how much easier their work was becoming."

"Wow," Mello breathed.

"Of course," Lawliet noted, "I needed them more than they needed me. I had no resources or manpower to speak of, and Quillish hated for me to put my safety at risk. Vigilantism is more difficult than it sounds: one man can make a difference, but only when other men stand behind him."

Light cleared his throat, knowing full well that his presence was known—and that he was simply being pointedly ignored in favor of freak-worship.

The quartet, witnesses and weirdo alike, looked up at him and commenced a rigorous program of innocent blinking.

Light tapped the case file meaningfully against his palm and spoke to Lawliet, inclining his head towards the Terrible Threesome. "You're all set to take care of my witnesses, then?" he prompted.

"Of course he is," Mello retorted immediately, eyes narrowed now and blazing bright. "Did _you_ ever help the local police department when _you_ were in college?"

Light frowned, severely he hoped. "Only in high school, actually," he responded crisply. "The university I attended was very quiet, but I worked with the NPA—that's the National Police Agency—when I still lived in Japan."

It was, in fact, one of the reasons he _had_ put an ocean between his home and the site of his higher education. Justice, whatever the price, was what he wanted for the world and what he wanted to impart to it, and he knew that he would pursue it wherever he could—but he wasn't going to grow up in his father's shadow, and, whether or not he'd earned his place, the whispers of nepotism would have hounded him until he snapped.

And that would have been a little bit embarrassing.

"Yeah," Mello muttered, the epitome of unconvinced skepticism, "sure. Well, what do you want?"

Light dropped the subject; he had nothing to prove. The only person he stood to impress was Lawliet, who could verify the matter with Matsuda if he and his idiosyncrasies felt so inclined.

He glanced briefly at the clock, having learned by now that all three of the boys were quick enough to catch the subtlety of the gesture.

"I just wanted to ensure that everything was prepared for you to go home with Lawliet," he explained. He addressed the next question to his colleague. "How do you usually get home, by the way?"

Lawliet hadn't quit it with the innocent blinking thing yet. "Generally," he responded, "I take the train—" Half-subway, half-train, wholly a nuisance; Light hated the whole system. "—and Quillish picks me up at the station."

Mello's face transitioned abruptly into Puppy Eye Mode. "But we've got stuff!" he protested. "Back at—the place we live! We've got to stop there first—c'mon, _please_?"

Lawliet smiled indulgently; these children already had him wrapped around their respective dirty little fingers. "I'm sure Quillish will be willing to stop there," he noted.

Light struggled with his conscience for a moment, but, regrettably, it overpowered him.

"I'll drive you," he sighed.

He had a vague idea of the hellish punishment that he'd just incurred, but life experience indicated that things were only about to get incalculably worse. He wondered what he'd done to deserve all of this.

Maybe he'd been a mass-murderer in a past life.

Matt, Mello, and Near eyed him mistrustfully for a moment before turning to Lawliet.

Light's last futile hope died when the man smiled and nodded, cheerily with just a smidgeon of sadistic glee.

Light didn't think it was possible for him to hate this guy any more.

He was, of course, very, very wrong.

—

"What are you _doing_?" he demanded.

Unperturbed by the interruption, Lawliet continued fiddling with the tuner dials. "I am browsing the radio, Yagami-kun," he answered placidly. "It is traditionally the duty of the individual sitting shotgun, in order to free the driver to concentrate."

Light clenched his fingers tightly around the rim of the wheel, wishing it was Lawliet's scrawny neck. "The _driver_ prefers to listen to _KDFC_—"

"The driver is boring," Mello put in.

"_Concentrate_, Yagami-kun," Lawliet ordered as Light, gritting his teeth, brought his Honda Accord to a slightly screechy halt at the next stoplight. "That is, as I mentioned, the entire point of—ah."

Light's knuckles were bone-white, and his dentist was going to have something to say about his sudden acquisition of a teeth-grinding habit.

Lawliet _would_—he _would_ listen to techno.

Probably not in his spare time—only when he was trying to push innocent people to the brink of violent suicide.

That effort was working so far.

Matt and Mello cheered and started dancing as enthusiastically as their secured seatbelts would allow, which involved a great deal of bouncing and arm-waving right in the range of the rearview mirror.

That decided it: Light was going to kill everyone.

Or he was going to drive his forest-green '98 Accord off of a cliff; there were a few good ones to choose from—scenic, serene, and high enough to fracture Lawliet's spinal cord at the first big bump.

He drew the car into the empty lot next to the place Mello specified—an abandoned warehouse, by the looks of it, a wreck of broken windows and sagging drywall scattered with crumbling cinderblocks, half-shredded plastic drifting spectrally in the salt-scented breeze.

Light felt as though someone had dropped one of those cinderblocks into his stomach.

"Charming," he commented weakly.

"Home sweet home," Near returned quietly as Matt and Mello burst out of either car door and scampered towards a gaping empty doorway, plastic bags for tumbleweeds skittering at their heels.

Lawliet, neck craned at an extremely awkward angle to watch them go, looked downright heartbroken.

Light supposed he _might_ be persuaded to let the man live.

The throbbing bass of the latest techno song faded into the drone of an uninspiring advertisement, and Lawliet's hand darted out to touch the power button, silencing it properly.

Near held one knee to his chest, a grimy sandal balancing on Light's clean backseat.

"It's not your fault," he remarked.

"That doesn't make it any easier to look on," Lawliet replied softly.

Near gave a small, almost secretive smile, and Lawliet reached out to touch a gentle hand to the boy's tangled white curls.

"I'm going to save you," Lawliet told him.

Light saw the searing quicksilver conviction in the pale eyes and believed it.

There wasn't time to muster adequate speech before the boys were flinging the doors open, hurtling inside, and slamming them shut again. Mello slung a black backpack and a duffel bag to the floor, their brand logos long since worn off, and Matt tossed his own bag down by his feet, passing Near another still. Mello pawed through his belongings, retrieved a chocolate bar with a gleaming gold label, pushed the scuffed foil out of the way, and took a tremendous bite.

"Well?" he prompted through it.

"You're going to spoil your dinner," Light said dumbly.

Matt perked up at the very word, and Light cringed inwardly, reaching hastily for the parking brake.

Change the subject. Changing the subject solved everything.

—

"Past here," Lawliet noted. "Take a left."

Light glanced at him bewilderedly, resisting the urge to slam his foot on the brake. "You live in _Pacific Heights_?"

Predictably, Lawliet just blinked huge gray eyes as if Light had inquired about the weather—which was cool but clear at the moment.

"Is that a problem, Yagami-kun?" he asked. "I texted Quillish telling him not to come, but I could rescind the message with a second—"

"_No_," Light interjected before the man could bombard him with any more utterly unnecessary details. "Just—it's… _ritzy_."

Lawliet blinked again. How did his tear ducts keep up?

Pondering the subject, Light's brain then saw fit to subject him to the supremely unsettling mental image of Lawliet pursing his lips and batting his eyelashes.

Some things in life didn't even bear contemplation.

"Quillish is a very successful inventor," Lawliet explained. "He says the view inspires him."

"I'm sure it does," Light acceded, thinking of the bleak brick walls that hedged his apartment, thinking of the claustrophobic inescapability of the similar buildings on either side.

A few demure directions later, Light was guiding his Accord through a wrought-iron gate and up the smooth slope of a sweeping drive, at the pinnacle of which a beautiful Victorian house stood tall, regal, and angular in the swelling shadow of the night.

Light was not jealous. Not at all. He wasn't picturing growing up in a house that crowned the undulating hills; wasn't dreaming of gazing out over the Bay before bedtime; wasn't fantasizing about reckless skateboard rides down the driveway and the ensuing narrow avoidances of traffic that would have splattered the adventurer on the street.

Of course not. Really.

It wasn't the size of your home; it was what you produced inside it.

…yes, he was going to Special Hell.

Lawliet clambered out of the vehicle and looked appreciatively up at the façade. The porch light glowed orange, and in its aura Light saw that there was even a _swing_.

He caught himself wondering if it was possible to put oneself up for retroactive adoption.

The backseat trio crept cautiously out of their haven, dragging their sparing luggage with them, and assembled on the pavement, staring at the house. For the first time since Light had become acquainted with the prepubescent psychopath, Mello looked distinctly intimidated.

"It doesn't bite," Lawliet assured them of the house, faintly amused now, as Light locked the car and pocketed his keys—Pacific Heights or not, this was still the city of San Francisco. "You'll like it. And yes, Yagami-kun; please come in at least long enough for tea."

So much for the polite hesitation he'd been perfecting.

Well, he wasn't one to refuse hospitality, regardless of the source.

Lawliet ushered the lot of them up the steps and into the foyer, where the boys set down their bags, and thence to the kitchen, which was clean, modern, modest, and warm. Light decided that he liked this place, everything else aside.

He liked it even better when a kind-eyed elderly gentleman with white hair, glasses, and a moustache turned to them, having just lifted an old-fashioned tea kettle off the stove, steam shimmering upwards from its spout.

Matt, Mello, and Near, however, immediately became extremely shy.

"Hello," the man greeted them, voice colored by a smart British accent. "Quillish Wammy, at your service. Mello, Matt, Near—and Light Yagami, I presume?"

"Yes, si—" Light began.

"That's right," Mello confirmed before he could finish, putting on a brave face for the purpose. "Nice to meet you."

Quillish shook hands all around, smiling still. "Welcome," he bid them. "Might I interest you in dinner and tea?"

Lawliet was already crossing the room to search the cabinets. "Cookies to go with the tea," he murmured—it sounded more like an excuse than an explanation.

"Chocolate ones?" Mello pressed interestedly, clutching the crumpled wrapper of his latest edible victim in his fist.

Quillish gave Lawliet a Look. "After the real food," he reproached fondly, with the air of one who had uttered the words too many times to count.

Reluctantly, Lawliet returned a bag of cookies to the shelf and closed the cabinet door, sharing a mournful expression with Mello.

"They'll be waiting when we're finished," he pledged.

Mello appeared to be relatively content with that arrangement.

—

Two and a half hours later, stuffed full of phenomenal spaghetti, fantastic garlic bread, and excellent tea, warmed straight through by the cuisine and the company in equal measure, Light had little choice but to take one last cookie for the road, bid everyone adieu, and make for his car. Quillish Wammy was too charismatic by half, and he had more stories to tell than the History Channel.

Light would know; Ms. History and Mr. Discovery Channel were his most familiar weekend guests.

In any case, Light now knew that, at the tender age of six, Quillish had been pushed onto a train and shipped out to the countryside in preparation for the Battle of Britain, to the effect that he and his nine-year-old brother had been taken in by a farmer with five children and twice as many acres of land. Quillish had spent an inordinate amount of time loitering around the man's tool shed-workshop, where he had first begun to tinker with metal and machinery.

A tactfully-unspecified quantity of years later, Quillish's love of experiment and exploration hadn't aged a day.

One thing was for sure—Light would be back for more stories, whether Lawliet liked it or not.

He was venturing to imagine that Lawliet wouldn't like it at all, which actually made it _more_ fun.

Light smirked to himself as he backed carefully down the driveway. His colleague could chalk it up as revenge for the fact that Light's radio was still set to the techno station.


	4. Pieces of Paper

_Author's Note: This chapter would have gotten written a lot faster if I hadn't been watching my brother play Grand Theft Auto the whole time…_

_But that was epic._

* * *

IV. Pieces of Paper

The alarm blared like a foghorn the next morning, and Light crushed his face into the pillow, fingers moving like an erratic spider across the nightstand in search of the elusive _Snooze_ button. One enterprising fingertip found it and depressed the thing, and the horrendous noise gave way to blessed silence.

Light rolled over, flung his arms out, and stared at the white ceiling, grayer for the Venetian blinds stifling the dawn beyond the windowpane. It was because he was tired. It was because it was early. It was because he'd had such a nice time last night.

He felt… alone.

It wasn't as though he was usually unconscious of the fact of his isolation; it wasn't as though he wasn't aware that Matsuda was the only person he really counted as a "friend"; it wasn't as though wading through all this mangled American English didn't hammer the point of his difference home every minute, every hour—but this was more than that. This was deep, and poignant, and profound, and it made him feel tiny. Weak. Forgettable.

He had only just begun to sulk when the snooze wore off, and the alarm howled in his ear again.

This time, he turned it off and sat up properly, rubbing at his face.

The way he woke up tended to set a precedent for the rest of the day.

This looked bad for our hero.

A bowl of cereal, a cup of coffee, the comics page, a Thermos of coffee for the car, and a hilly car ride spent trying not to spill it later, he was looking at his reflection in the stainless steel panel above the elevator buttons.

His tie was a little crooked, but a bit of expert fiddling fixed that.

He paused by Aizawa's desk, having noticed that a certain increasingly-impossible, wild-haired, posse-possessing someone hadn't yet graced the office with his presence—which was understandable, given that Light was a minimum of five minutes early to everything.

"Matsuda in yet?" he inquired.

Aizawa shook his head. "He's still got a few minutes."

Light sipped demurely at his Thermos and glanced at Lawliet's desk, crowned as it was by the candy bowl.

"What's it like working with him?" he prompted before decorum could get the better of him.

Aizawa raised an eyebrow. "Well," he answered slowly, "he's brilliant, and he doesn't seem to sleep. Terrible at small-talk, which is probably the way he likes it, since it means that nobody knows anything about him."

Light frowned his agreement over the rim of the Thermos. "But he doesn't… deliberately aggravate you?"

Aizawa raised the other eyebrow with a knowing smirk that Light didn't like. "No," he responded. "I'm his partner, so perhaps it's a tactical decision to treat me with respect, but I think that with someone like Lawliet, deliberate aggravation probably means he likes you."

Light tried to stare him down, but Aizawa merely leaned back in his chair and attempted to keep the triumphant grinning to a minimum.

"How do you figure?" Light managed.

"Oh, come on," Aizawa scoffed. "Don't you remember gradeschool? Kids always harass the people they like best; negative attention is still attention. Lawliet's like that. Either he likes you, or he's interested in you—and for him, they're probably the same thing."

Light gave that a moment to settle in his brain, which it did heavily and slimily, like Jabba the Hutt.

It was a very good thing that _no one_ in this office was a mind-reader.

"This is the most unsettling conversation I've had in a long time," he decided.

Taking "in a long time" to mean "since yesterday," when he had repeatedly conversed with Lawliet himself, it was true.

Aizawa laughed dryly. "You must not get out much," he remarked.

"I'm focused," Light countered, sounding defensive even to his own ears.

"There's a difference," Aizawa told him, "between 'focused' and 'trapped.'"

Light was saved the trial of inventing a witty retort when a commotion at the elevator doors distracted them.

None too surprisingly, it was Lawliet and his nobly-adopted brood.

"Can you teach us how to shoot a gun?" Mello was demanding, eyes lit again with the usual earnest fire.

"No," Lawliet answered patiently. "I don't even carry mine unless the circumstances require it."

"But you can shoot," Mello persisted.

"Yes; it's part of train—"

"Can you shoot some stuff in the backyard when we get home?"

"Mello, there are regulations—"

"You're gonna let a piece of paper tell you what to do?" Mello pressed.

Lawliet smiled, stepping around Light to set his black shoulder bag down on the desk. "Firearm legislation is hardly 'a piece of paper,'" he replied.

Mello gave Light a challenging look edged with a hint of pout. "Do _you_ carry a gun?" he wanted to know.

Wordlessly Light drew his jacket open to reveal his shoulder holster. Mello's eyes widened precipitously.

"The safety's always on," Light cautioned. "Don't get any ideas."

Mello's grin was amazingly evil for a child of his age and size.

"Oh, I'm getting _lots_ of ideas," he reported.

Light glanced at Aizawa in the hopes of sharing a beleaguered look, only to discover that he had never seen his colleague more amused.

"You probably don't want to talk that way in a police station," Near commented. "They outnumber you, for starters."

"Precisely," Lawliet said. "Good morning, Shuichi, Yagami-kun. Is your daughter feeling better today?"

Judiciously, Light assumed that the question was directed at Aizawa.

"She's fine now, thank you," Aizawa replied. "Food poisoning, I think. You know how it goes."

Speaking of food, Lawliet was now devoting his attention to his bowl of candy and selecting a few conversation hearts.

Light stared. "You're going to eat _candy_ at _nine in the morning_?" he managed.

Lawliet popped the first of his acquisitions unconcernedly into his mouth. "Why not?" he asked in answer.

"Your blood sugar—" Light sputtered. "And you probably just brushed your teeth—"

Mello found another gold-labeled bar of chocolate in his backpack and pointedly unwrapped the end.

"You're all crazy," Light decided.

"Here, Yagami-kun," Lawliet said.

Instinctively, Light held his hand out towards Lawliet's extended one. A pink conversation heart was deposited in his palm.

Light drew it closer for a better look.

Predictably, the message was "_DIVA_."

Before he had cranked his glare up from _discontented_ to _incinerating_, someone smacked him gently in the small of the back with what felt like a manila folder.

No, today was _not_ his day.

He turned the midway-between-peeved-and-seething glare on Matsuda, who was strolling past him waving the weapon responsible.

"Autopsy finally came in," he announced.

Light could think of a few people he'd like to autopsy, though odds were he'd be cutting them open before they'd actually died.

—

Wisely, preferring not to have any homicides of his _own _doing on his record, Light stopped by the break room to fill the mug that he kept on his desk—which read _Americans think this says something clever_ in Japanese—with cheap coffee before proceeding to Matsuda's office.

"Somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed," Matsuda noted idly, passing him the file.

"Try the wrong side of the ocean," Light muttered, setting the mug down, settling in the folding chair, and flicking the cover of the folder open.

"It's about to get worse," Matsuda warned with a sigh.

Light scanned the page—and then the next, and the next.

"_Nothing_?" he concluded, mood dipping a little lower still.

"Nothing except a bit of very much expected malnutrition," Matsuda confirmed.

Light tossed the file back down on Matsuda's desk, taking up with his coffee mug again instead. "And nothing to go on," he translated.

"Well," Matsuda mused, "let's think about this logically. Why would you kill a homeless child with nothing to lose?"

"I wouldn't know," Light mumbled into his mug. "I only kill people on weekends."

Matsuda gave him the Reprimanding Eyebrow. "Play along, Light," he suggested. "We were thinking yesterday that it's possible Sander saw or heard something that he shouldn't have—maybe a drug deal?"

"Anyone that powerful would carry a gun," Light responded.

"They're still working on the exact nature of the weapon," Matsuda agreed (Light's brain jumped to _X-Acto knife _without his permission, and he clenched the handle of his mug to resist the urge to slap himself upside the head), "but they cut straight through his sternum, so it must have been something impressive."

Light glanced over the tox report again. "No drugs in his system, and no head wound…" He looked up at Matsuda, trying not to cringe. "He was _alive_ while they did this to him?"

Placidly, Matsuda paperclipped a few sheets together. "Which is why we need to find whoever did this and put them away until they forget what the world looks like."

Light had always heard that Matsuda was a downright vicious defender of justice when the chips were down. Imagining his partner pointing a gun barrel at a deserving criminal's forehead, dark eyes hard, boyish face unyielding, was… frighteningly easy, come to think of it.

That was disturbing.

Matsuda took the folder, added some notes in pencil, and handed it back. "Make yourself a copy of this," he instructed, "and then see if you can get through the rest of the paperwork on that hit and run." Didn't they have interns for this? "Call the lawyer if you've got any questions, though you should be all right, since he was awfully thorough. As for this one, you might talk to Lawl—"

"It's our case," Light cut in, standing. "He and Aizawa have their own."

Matsuda's smile was awfully similar to the one Aizawa had given him earlier—as if they were all sharing in some inside joke, to which he was somehow completely oblivious.

"I only mention it," he explained, "because he's so logical. The two of you collaborating would be quite something, don't you think?"

Light straightened the contents of the folder meticulously. "I'll work on it," he decided.

He left the _alone_ implied.

"As you like," Matsuda replied, smiling angelically.

Light wondered if one could find the mystery murder weapon in your average police office.

—

He was halfway to the copier when he realized he'd left his coffee on Matsuda's desk.

He couldn't even mutter obscenities under his breath, because he was dangerously close to Lawliet's desk, where the children were lurking.

Well, taking "lurking" to mean "completing Sudokus," which Near was doing in pen.

At least Lawliet had found a way to keep them entertained that didn't involve gambling, whiteboards, Sharpie vandalism, firecrackers, or handcuffs.

God only knew what they'd come up with if anyone gave them permission to play with the copy machine.

Light suppressed a shudder and went about his business.

—

Aizawa was already in the break room starting lunch when Light, having slaved away hacking at the bureaucratic jungle's red tape vines for just over three hours, dragged a certain set of case files in and joined him.

"How are you holding up?" he asked as he took his good mug over to the coffeemaker again.

"All right," Aizawa answered, twirling what looked like leftover fettuccine around his plastic fork. "I don't know what it is with this city—Lawliet and I are looking into a bunch of bomb threats now."

It figured.

Aizawa shrugged. "Guess that's the way it is when you get enough people in a small space. Something's got to give."

Light nodded his assent as he sat, cradling his mug in both hands. "I think the population density must be a large part of the problem."

Aizawa was eyeing his mug, and not in the does-that-say-something-clever way. "Weren't you chugging coffee this morning?" he inquired.

Light smiled, slightly guiltily. "The amount of coffee that I drink is directly proportional to the amount of work I get done," he replied. "And inversely proportional to the number of people I want to kill doing it."

Aizawa smirked. "You should get an IV drip of caffeine," he remarked.

Light made a show of considering. "I'd have to drag it around with me," he noted. "Though I guess that's not too different from the way it is now."

Before the repartee could progress any further, Lawliet slouched in, disciples in tow.

Mello went for the fridge, Near went for the empty chair, and Matt went for the pinball machine.

From what Light could tell, that summed things up pretty succinctly.

Mello had eaten enough chocolate that even he seemed to be feeling ill, Near had rearranged all the jam containers into an intricate pyramid, Matt had destroyed Johnson's high score by well over ten thousand points, and Lawliet had inhaled three-quarters of a piece of cake by the time Matsuda walked into the room.

He didn't look like he was ready to join the party.

He looked, in fact, like he'd just come from a funeral.

Or from a crime scene.

An unblinking Near met Matsuda's gaze.

"Do you know a Billy Nattle, friend of Sander's?" he asked.

Near nodded slowly.

There was a long pause broken only by the cheerful dinging of the pinball machine's overzealous sound effects.

"Not anymore?" Near supplied.

Matsuda slapped a new manila folder down on the table in front of Light.

"Not anymore," he said.


	5. Full of Mysteries

_Author's Note: If you have not had dim sum, you have not truly lived._

* * *

V. Full of Mysteries

Light hated his alarm clock.

He hated its searing red numbers, and he hated its complicated dials, but most of all, he hated its bleating, boorish voice, which was reprimanding instead of apologetic about the fact that it had to drag him out of his warm, soft, dreadfully appealing bed.

To be fair, while time ought to have been kind enough as to slow down on his behalf, it wasn't the clock's fault that he'd stayed late at work and then had trouble getting to sleep after studying the latest round of crime scene photos.

Billy had gone the same way as Sander—painfully, gruesomely, horrifically.

Light hadn't been able to eat, either.

Hence he was starving, exhausted, and cynical, with what felt like the beginnings of a headache mustering its forces at the base of his skull.

His alarm clock was lucky he only pushed it off of the nightstand, as opposed to taking a sledgehammer to its machinery.

Light had a bad habit of shooting messengers.

—

He closed his eyes as the elevator ferried him smoothly upward and focused his thoughts intently on the date. It was Thursday. Thursday was almost Friday, and Friday was the start of the weekend. Yes, the weekend… two full days of solitude and sanity. That was what he needed, what he wanted, what he craved—and he was almost there. It was so close he could taste it.

It tasted like Chinese takeout and the tea his mother sent from home.

The elevator _ding_ed cheerily, doors rattling aside, and released him. It wasn't quite five-to-nine, and Aizawa was already behind his desk, reading the newspaper and sipping at a white mug blazoned with tiny handprints in bright colors—one of the sort that you made yourself at those places that would glaze it for you.

Light paused by his colleague's desk, looking at the mug, looking at the portrait in the cherry-wood frame: Aizawa's wife, beaming, with the older girl clinging to her elbow and the baby balanced on her knee.

He wasn't sure why, but Light posed the question batting inquisitive wings against his brain.

"Are you afraid for them?" he asked. "Your daughters."

Aizawa smiled. "Every minute," he said. "Afraid they'll grow up when I have my back turned; afraid they won't get the chance to; afraid when I let Yumi walk home from school; afraid when I close the door after tucking her into bed. That's part of loving someone. You have to trust in it, and in them, and in the world, and that's a frightening thing."

Light did not know what had possessed him to incite this kind of philosophical engagement at nine in the morning, but whatever it was would be getting a slap in the face as soon as he tracked it down.

Before he could contemplate its whereabouts, the elevator opened again, admitting Lawliet—Lawliet, who was windblown, wide-eyed, and generally even more disheveled than was the norm, and from whose hand a silver bicycle helmet dangled by the chin strap.

At their stares—Light's incredulous; Aizawa's amused—Lawliet ceded a shrug and explained, "Quillish is taking the boys to the pediatrician and then to the mall, meaning that he couldn't drive me to the train station."

"Errands at this hour?" Light inquired.

Setting down his messenger bag, Lawliet kicked his helmet under his desk. Bike or no, he was still wearing sandals. "The earlier you go to the doctor's," he noted, "the less previous delays will have compounded, and the faster you will be helped." He settled in his chair and abandoned his flip-flops in favor of drawing both knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. "And the less delays they have, the better, given that all three of them have to get their shots."

"Oh?" Light managed.

Lawliet nodded gravely and started counting them off one long finger at a time. "Tetanus, meningitis, hepatitis, rabies…"

Light didn't even want to know whether or not he was joking.

This time, the manila folder clipped him in the back of the head.

"Quit flirting," Matsuda reprimanded. "We've got work to do."

"Ex_cuse_ me?" Light demanded, steadying his voice against a squeak as he felt a furious heat creeping up his neck.

It was a small consolation that Lawliet had more than a bit of pink in his cheeks as well.

Though that boon was mostly canceled out by the fact that Aizawa choked on his coffee struggling not to laugh.

—

Light made the conscious decision not to get defensive on the "flirting" issue—which was honestly, the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard; _him_? and _Lawliet_? You might as well charge oil and water with the crime of blending together too well; couldn't a man strike up a conversation without being subject to such slanderous accusations?—given that defensiveness could easily be taken as a sign of guilt.

He was a cop, too. He knew this stuff.

When they reached the office, Matsuda set the folder on the desk blotter, sat down, and folded his hands on it. Light wished momentarily that his partner provided something more comfortable for visitors than folding chairs, only to realize that such a contingency would have ended with him curled up asleep before Matsuda could get a word in edgeways.

As it was, the man was having enough trouble competing with Light's wandering thoughts.

"We've doubled the company of officers stationed in disadvantaged areas of the city," Matsuda was explaining, "particularly near the crime scenes, in the hopes that we may ward the culprit off. It's all overtime work, and in this economy, they're taking it, but we can't afford to go on like this too long. We need to figure out who's doing this and put them the hell _away_."

Light rubbed his eyes, recalled that the bacteria on his hands were getting a neat, unimpeded shortcut to the rest of him that way, and settled with blinking profusely.

"We don't have anything to go on," he managed. "Have we even determined the murder weapon? How about Billy—do we have the autopsy yet?"

"Sander was killed… the majority of the work was done with a hacksaw," Matsuda said quietly, "and there were probably power tools involved, especially to make the initial incision. Billy… was with a chef's cleaver."

Light envisioned the knife block on his kitchen counter and fervently regretted having eaten breakfast.

"Sander says 'industrial' to me," he decided, pushing everything but the evidence out of his mind. "But the city's full of warehouses—it's a port."

"Sander was killed where we found him," Matsuda added, "which was in the alley behind a family-owned bakery."

Light frowned. "To kill them the same way," he mused, "but with different weapons—what is that, some kind of calling card? Trying to get our attention?"

Matsuda sighed. "The coroner says that Billy's skull was cracked in such a way as to indicate that he was probably unconscious when it happened. I'm drawing from that that they just shoved him to the ground and cut him open. This isn't precision work." He shifted. "It could be intended as a message."

"But what the hell does that say?" Light demanded. "'I hate orphans; the puppies are next'?"

Matsuda nudged a pen in a slow circle around its balance point. "That's a difficult question. What we need is the motive."

Light frowned. "Billy was killed half a mile from where Sander was. It can't be a territorial thing at that rate—but they were friends. Maybe they were together, and they both saw something they shouldn't have?" He wrinkled his nose. "But they're _homeless_. They're disenfranchised. I'm sure you could ensure their silence another way." He paused, thinking of the breathless speed with which Matt had inhaled his spaghetti. "Like with _food_, for Christ's sake. It had to be something else that they wanted from them—but what can you want from a kid who has nothing?"

Shaking his head, Matsuda pushed Billy Nattle's file across the desk. "Make yourself a copy of this one," he instructed. "There might be another soon."

Light took it, heaved himself out of the chair, and started out to the hall.

"Light?" Matsuda prompted just as he turned the door handle. He looked over his shoulder, and Matsuda's eyes were muddled. "I'm considering asking for help on this one. We can't let this get any bigger, and we're not making any progress. A few more sets of eyes could make all the difference, and that's more important than succeeding in this on our own."

What he was really saying was, _That's more important than our pride_.

Light took a deep breath. "Yeah," he responded. "I agree."

—

On the way back from the copier, Light filled his spare mug (which was plain black with large white letters reading "MINE") with cheap break room coffee. Overburdened and overbalanced, it utterly figured that the fresh copies slipped form his grip and scattered like snowflakes on the floor just as he was passing Lawliet's desk.

_Damn_ it.

Obligingly enough, but with a mischievous smile, Lawliet jumped up and sauntered over to help collect the detritus.

"I see you saved the coffee, Yagami-kun," he remarked.

Light sighed, pushing his bangs off of his forehead with a newly-empty hand and bending to collect the sheets nearest him.

"I have my priorities," he replied.

He made the mistake of glancing at Lawliet's desk as he stood again—more specifically, at the candy bowl.

"You _do_ know that it's no longer Valentine's Day," he commented.

Lawliet was shuffling through his portion of the recovered papers with interest. "I have learned to interpret the calendar, yes," he answered bemusedly. "I'll put chocolate coins in for Saint Patrick's Day, and then there will be jellybeans and chocolate eggs for Easter."

"Is that how you go through the year, then?" Light inquired.

Lawliet looked momentarily up at him. "Candy holiday by candy holiday?" he asked, frowning faintly. "Doesn't everyone?"

Before Light could articulate a snappy riposte, Lawliet was handing his copies back.

"It's an interesting case, Yagami-kun," was his verdict, the great gray eyes painstakingly unassuming.

Light accepted the sheets and slid them into their folder, smiling thinly. "And one that you have a personal investment in," he pointed out.

Lawliet smiled back, impishly. "Which makes me all the more committed to the outcome," he returned.

Aizawa sipped blithely at his own coffee cup. "Maybe you two should discuss it over lunch," he suggested innocently.

Never before had Light pined so desperately for spontaneous combustion.

Or for a flamethrower, with which he could induce it in all witnesses within firing range.

"We should _all_ go out for lunch," he declared a little too quickly. "It's been a long week, after all, and we never talk about anything _but_ the cases."

It was a pretty good save.

…if you were a six-year-old soccer goalie.

Light was distantly, miserably curious as to why his touted mental facilities had, over the course of the last two days, completely disappeared.

The police department was full of mysteries these days.

—

Lawliet was picking avidly at his sticky rice, deftly negotiating the lotus leaf wrapping.

"If it's not too personal a question," he mumbled with his mouth full, "why did you come to America, Yagami-kun?"

Chatter rippled around them from the other patrons of the dim sum restaurant, the carts' rumbling muted by the carpet, chopsticks clicking on ceramic all around. Miraculously, Light's headache had actually receded.

Light scoffed. "Land of the free?" he prompted. "Home of the brave? Ringing any Liberty Bells?" At Lawliet's arched eyebrow (or what he could see of it under all the hair), he grinned. "The streets are paved with gold and diamonds. Skittles rain from the sky."

Matsuda laughed. "You definitely watch American television."

"That would cost Mars, Incorporated a great deal of money in wasted revenue," Lawliet murmured.

"Good point," Light replied. He blew delicately on his tea. "I wanted to go to an American university," he explained. "And they were willing to take me."

Lawliet smiled placidly while viciously skewering a shrimp dumpling, which was a slightly disturbing juxtaposition. "But surely there was a samurai school atop Mount Fuji that you could have attended," he countered slyly.

"That was my elementary education," Light assured him. One of the passing carts caught his eye, and he half-raised his hand to flag it down. "Anyone else for taro?"

"Go for it," Aizawa told him, negotiating a growing stack of empty serving plates. "They're good here."

"Get an order of the custard tarts, too, Yagami-kun," Lawliet urged, waving his ivory chopsticks absently. "Do they have sponge cake?"

"Keep an eye out for it," Light recommended, beaming at the woman with the cart that bore the coveted dish, of which he accepted one and proffered their bill for her to stamp.

"Why does anyone come to the U.S.?" Matsuda wondered over the rim of his teacup, chrysanthemum petals drifting away from his breath. "And why does anyone stay here?"

Light smiled and snatched one of the newly-arrived custard tarts while Lawliet had his head turned.

"Have you looked around lately?" he inquired. "There's nowhere in the _universe_ like San Francisco, let alone the world."

Aizawa went for the beef cheong fun. "Though with six billion people," he contributed, "there's probably someone eerily like each of us out there somewhere."

Lawliet snorted. "There's no one like _me_," he decided.

"Thank God for that," Light teased, lifting his teacup in a brief mock-toast. "One of you is definitely enough."

Lawliet smiled like a cat. "I do so try to satisfy," he replied.

Light felt his face go strangely warm.

It was because of the tea steam.

Obviously.

In an attempt to hide behind his cup, Light downed a deep draught and burned his tongue, which might have been the world's way of telling him to hold it next time.

Aizawa and Matsuda shared a horrifyingly meaningful look.

This just kept getting better and better.


	6. Professionals

_Author's Note: I'm still waiting for 3 Doors Down to record a song called "Chrysanthemum Tea."_

* * *

VI. Professionals

It was slightly strange how much pleasanter drudgery was when you went about it on a full, contented stomach.

Surprise, of the contented variety, registered on Matsuda's expression as Light smacked a stack of paperwork down on the man's desk blotter—a stack of considerable size even for Light, whose efficiency was not to be understated.

"Thank you," Matsuda said, meaning it.

Light happily waved it off. "It's the tea," he explained. "It makes me want to be a better person."

Matsuda grinned. "The transformative power of chrysanthemum?" he hazarded. "Maybe you should go out into the world and see what wrongs you can right armed with your newfound altruism and antioxidants."

"Faster than a speeding courtesy," Light took up, "leaping tall injustices in a single moral bound."

"Go forth and change the world," Matsuda instructed.

And maybe that was how you did it—one kindness at a time.

Light had an odd premonition-ish feeling that this would be more difficult than he anticipated.

Chrysanthemum Tea Man, however, was undaunted by the misgivings of his mild-mannered alter ego.

—

Just after five, as he started towards the stairs, shouldering on his coat—for he always took the stairs down; to do otherwise, he felt, was to squander the powers of the elevator—Light noticed Lawliet gathering helmet, windbreaker, and shoulder bag.

For a horrifically critical moment, the chrysanthemum tea took over.

Shit was like _kryptonite_.

"Do you want a ride home?" he heard his voice dare to ask.

He saw out of the corner of his eye that Aizawa looked like a kid in a candy store.

Aizawa looked like _Lawliet_ in a candy store.

Oh, hell.

Lawliet himself, currently in a police office, looked startled. The tiniest bit hesitantly, he smiled.

"That would be very much appreciated, Yagami-kun," he replied.

"If you know what I _mean_," Aizawa added under his breath, just a few decibels too loudly.

Lawliet flushed and sent his partner a wounded look.

"Somebody needs to untie Light 'Straight-Laces' Yagami," Aizawa defended.

"Wh­—_what_?" Light managed to sputter.

"Oh," Aizawa remarked, half-airy, half-awkward. "I thought you knew about that."

Light stared at him.

"Perhaps, Yagami-kun," Lawliet put in, "we should go."

The road could always do with a reprimand. Hitting it sounded good right about now.

Light was categorically not running away from this situation. Certainly not.

"Yeah," he acceded, "let's go." He gave Aizawa a Look.

Aizawa winked.

On his way to the stairs, Light made sure to mutter something audible about crazy people and their inexplicable projections, which they should keep far away from his completely unrelated personal life, which was doing just fine on its own, if the crazy people were curious, thank you very, _very_ much.

To be fair, he probably wasn't helping his case.

—

Lawliet unlocked his bike from the rack where he'd secured it just outside the building.

"Don't let it get to you," he recommended.

"It's not getting to me," Light said. "What's getting to me?"

Lawliet glanced at him, but he continued before Light could comment on his evident—and extremely unjust—amusement.

"Shuichi," Lawliet explained, "has been attempting to set me up with someone—anyone, but don't take that personally—since the first day we began work together. I suspect he as adopted me as…" He zipped the bike lock into his bag and, taking the handlebars, started pushing the bicycle towards the parking lot. "…something of a geeky younger brother, it seems—the one who will never get a prom date unless you bribe your friend's sister to ask him."

"We didn't have anything quite like a prom," Light commented. "Though I heard about them."

"I was homeschooled," Lawliet responded. "More specifically, I suppose, I did my coursework mostly online. Quillish and I did a great deal of traveling until I decided to settle regularly at a four-year university." He considered. "Though even then I did overseas study twice."

Fishing in his pocket for his keys, Light looked at Lawliet sidelong. "What's home, then?" he asked. "If you've lived everywhere, what do you identify with?"

Lawliet shrugged and smiled. "Quillish's doorstep is home," he answered. "I'm home where I hold the house key." Deftly, he manipulated a series of silver nuts and bolts, removing both wheels from his bike and sliding the pair of them and then the frame into the backseat of Light's Accord. "There are places that _feel_ like home, like a place of belonging—southern France, and Prague, and Victoria in British Columbia—and I was raised in Winchester, in England. I'm fond of Washington, D.C. Largely, though… where you make home is where home is. Where the people you love let you in." This was spoken over the roof of the car, and then Lawliet smiled as they both ducked inside to occupy the front seats. "And preferably," he noted, "where they then proceed to feed you." He drew his seatbelt into place. "Is San Francisco home for you, Yagami-kun?"

Light turned the keys in the ignition, and the engine rumbled obediently into life.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I do love it, but everything falls short of Japan one way or another." He twisted to squint over his shoulder, carefully backing the car out of the mostly empty lot, guiding it around its stationary fellows. "Then again, it's been three years since I visited. I've probably made it into a myth already."

Lawliet gazed absently out the window as they started down the street, thumbing at his bottom lip. "I liked Japan," he noted. "Good weather. Good people. Fascinating cultu—_Light_."

There was something in the tone of Lawliet's voice that made Light's blood's temperature dip thirty degrees in an instant.

"_Pull over_," Lawliet ordered, and Light didn't even think—just jerked the wheel rightward, skidded up to the curb, jammed the stick into _Park_, and yanked on the parking brake.

Out the back window on Lawliet's side, an alley stretched off into the fading world of twilight. Within the sparest reach of the sunset's watercolor light, a dark-clothed figure in a ski mask knelt over a second, unmoving form.

Steel gleamed.

Light's feet were on the pavement, his left hand slamming the car door as he reached for his gun with the right.

Lawliet on the sidewalk side had a few seconds on him, but their target had taken off like a jackrabbit—following the black windbreaker disappearing deeper in the alley, Light skirted the brutalized corpse (for so it was; eyes glazed, still fingers half-curled as if to cradle something they'd lost, a halo of blood blending into the pavement as the world around it slowly dimmed) and avoided Lawliet's abandoned sandals, sprinting after, flicking off his pistol's safety as he ran.

Cursing viciously in his head so that he wouldn't have to spare the breath, Light careened around the corner Lawliet's pale feet had flashed beyond, scrabbling for his own footing, keeping the gun carefully raised above his right shoulder, barrel to the sky. This alley let out onto the street—onto a sidewalk dotted with passersby, with children lugging sports equipment home, with homemakers on errands, with career people emerging from coffee shops with the day's last fix.

There was a dark figure in the distance, shoving by human obstacles on either side, backlit by the low sun glowing orange and underpinned by the gasps and screams as the light glinted, blinding, on the long knife in one gloved hand.

Between Light and his adversary was Lawliet—Lawliet, defter, smoother than Light ever would have imagined, darting, sidestepping, flowing like a shadow through the bottlenecks, sidestepping clusters of innocents.

God _damn_, he was fast.

Which, of course, only underscored the fact that there was absolutely no time to spend marveling at it.

Light took the sidewalk going full-tilt, ignoring the environment, listening only to his every economical breath and the pounding of his soles on the sidewalk, to the shrill voice in his head howling at him to move _faster_, or they'd _lose him_—

The gun was garnering new screams of its own, but there wasn't time—an S.U.V. screeched to a halt six inches short of his shoulder as he raced heedlessly over a crosswalk without consulting the stoplight, and the horn blared, the deafening intrusion only accentuating the thudding of Light's heartbeat in his ears.

He was focusing on Lawliet, who—_damn_!—swerved around another corner, presumably into another alley, and there was a gaggle of teenaged girls with Coach purses giving Light an unsettling onceover as he flew past—

He skidded around the turn and found himself hemmed in by red brick, scattered black trash bags vomiting their contents onto dank cement—and at the end of this alleyway rose a chain-link fence, which Lawliet was scaling in bare feet, scrambling up it like a cat, slinging himself over, and vanishing behind the boards that shored it up from the other side.

Light did not want to climb a chain-link fence in these shoes.

Light did not want to climb a chain-link fence carrying a gun.

Really, Light did not want to climb a chain-link fence under any circumstances, and these were just about the worst ones he could think of.

The urge to quit the police force on the spot was extraordinarily strong.

Light shoved his pistol into the holster, reached up, gripped the wire, and jammed one foot into a diamond-shaped hole, then the other, dragging himself upwards, gritting his teeth and bearing the way the rusty steel dug into his hands.

It looked like a long way down to the pavement from the top.

As Light soon discovered, it _was_ a long way down to the pavement from the top.

His knees were never going to recover.

Lawliet was nowhere in sight. Jogging now, the voice in his head having pointedly changed its tune to _"I hate this job,"_ he looked this way, that way, into every doorway, down every possible path—

On the sidewalk where the alley met the street, staring off at nothing, Lawliet stood, stark in the waning sunlight, shoulders shifting as he panted.

He was alone.

He turned as Light approached, and a bitter resignation had quelled the mischievous fire that usually sparked in the wide gray eyes.

"He's gone," their owner reported unnecessarily.

"We'd better get back to the body," Light said.

"Justifiably distracted," Lawliet muttered.

Light nodded, putting his hands in his pockets, and gave the disappointed silence one more moment to fester before he searched for the nearest street sign to guide them back to where they'd begun.

—

Light closed his eyes, put his hand over his mouth, and took four deep, even breaths, picking a point in the center of his chest and anchoring it in the space. He was not going to throw up. He was a professional. This would be fine.

He opened his eyes and crouched next to Lawliet, who was surveying the carnage, apparently unperturbed, as they waited for the cavalry Light had summoned by telephone. The damage, as always, was almost paralyzing in its inhuman cruelty and the pointedly human cost. Light knew he would never be able to erase the image from his mind, and the unmistakable metallic tang of blood had permeated the immediate air so entirely that he couldn't smell anything else.

Lawliet said nothing, so Light stood and left him to it until the sirens came.

—

Lawliet was silent yet as they forged through the city towards Pacific Heights. He tossed his flip-flops onto the floor, drew both knees up to him, wrapped his arms around them, and settled his chin to peer out over them as if across a barricade.

Light was vaguely fascinated to find that there were things in life that took precedence over the cleanliness of his car's upholstery.

Beethoven drifted, softly, from the speakers.

"It's not them," Light said quietly.

"Not yet," Lawliet whispered.

"They're safe with you," Light countered. "No one will recognize them now."

"Whoever is doing this knows where to find children who evade police officers and health care workers every day," Lawliet retorted. "I guarantee you that any emaciated child out here, for a bit of food, would tell them anything _else_ they wanted to know. Matt, Mello, and Near are incredibly intelligent—and they have a sense of whom to trust because of it—but not all of the others will think to be so cautious."

Light was not going to notice the strange feeling that relaxed his shoulders at this short but potent example of Lawliet's excellent grammar.

Lawliet, as it were, hugged his knees. "They haven't done anything wrong," he said. "None of them have done anything wrong. They're _children_. They're alone."

Light put his blinker on, checked his mirrors, and turned onto Lawliet's street.

"You know what the danger is," he pointed out. "You know they need to _be_ safe, so you know to protect them. That's probably more than whoever's behind this is expecting."

Lawliet watched Quillish's Victorian materialize from the darkness, windows aglow.

"If we'd caught him—"

"Don't," Light interrupted. "It happened; it's done. We tried, and that's something in and of itself. We'll _find_ him. First of all, we know it's a _him_ now, which is more than we had before—and we were close, which means it's possible to catch him at it. He makes mistakes."

"We were lucky," Lawliet responded petulantly, glaring out the window. "And now he'll be more careful. He's holding all the cards, Yagami-kun. All we've got is what he chooses to put down on the table."

Oh, God, they were getting metaphorical. They were sitting in Lawliet's driveway, and they were getting metaphorical.

Lawliet seemed to realize it, too, for he unfolded his legs and unbuckled his seatbelt.

"Thank you for the ride," he murmured. "Would you like to come in?"

"Oh, no, thank you," Light managed. "I'd hate to impose, and I have some housekeeping to do."

If you took "housekeeping" to mean "curling up in a ball on his bed, trying to purge the cynicism so that he could force himself to get out of the aforementioned bed the next morning," it wasn't even a lie.

Lawliet might have been nodding, though his hair, and therefore the considerable portion of his face it obscured, was virtually indistinguishable from the night. "Another time," he conceded. "Quillish likes you."

"Does he really?" Light sighed, smiling gently. "And he seemed so reasonable…"

Lawliet met his eyes and offered a smile of his own—tenuous, but warm.

"Appearances can be deceiving," he noted.

"Have a good night," Light bid him.

"You as well," Lawliet returned, shutting the car door and moving towards the front step.

The door opened before he'd quite reached it, and three smaller shapes spilled out to fight over who was to carry which portion of the bike. A taller figure behind them raised a generous hand in greeting, and Light reciprocated before pulling out of the driveway to get reacquainted with the road.

Home was where the people you loved let you in.

And preferably fed you.


	7. Pink Shirts

_Author's Note: Light's dubious color choice comes courtesy of the much-too-wonderful IceQueenRex. :D_

_I am not a morning person. Unless you count the hours of the morning that come right after midnight. XD_

* * *

VII. Pink Shirts

It was only when Light was already in the elevator that he realized that he was wearing a pink shirt.

Sadly, he couldn't even say _the pink shirt_, due to the possibility that he… might have owned more than one.

Maybe.

Which did not change the fact that he had somehow suffered such an egregious lapse in judgment as to select one to wear to work when half of his colleagues were accusing him of being a flaming homosexual—and when the odd whims and bright eyes of another of his associates were making it seem frighteningly plausible.

In a grave somewhere in Germany, Freud was howling with laughter.

Though he thought he'd read somewhere that Freud had been cremated.

In _any_ case, all of this anxiety, sleeplessness, and general trauma was markedly impacting his decision-making, and he needed to tread very, very carefully.

Consciously and judiciously, he elected not to shoot the breeze with Aizawa this morning, knowing quite well that Mr. Matchmaker would have something pithy to say about the color of his raiment, and instead retreated quickly to his desk to nurse the rest of the day's second cup of coffee.

He was trying not to think about the eventual yield.

In fact, he was trying not to think about anything, which was, as he had discovered on various occasions, virtually impossible for someone of his intelligence.

More was the pity.

Matsuda arrived precisely at nine and strode directly up to Light's desk, looking about as cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat as Light felt.

But at least he wasn't wearing _pink_.

Brandishing a new manila folder, Matsuda shook his head.

"This one's different," he announced.

Light snagged some absent loafer's desk chair and pushed it opposite his desk for Matsuda to occupy.

"Female," he recalled as he attempted to coax the ornery wheels over the carpet, "unlike the last two."

Matsuda set the folder down before him and flicked it open.

"And older," he pointed out.

_Angela Avery_, Light read. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and, sure enough, the date of birth made her just over nineteen—whereas Sander and Billy had been respectively fifteen and fourteen and a half.

"Expanding the parameters?" Light hazarded. "Maybe they assumed it was a younger boy that they were after, but—"

"How do we know it's not random now?" Matsuda cut in impatiently. "Must there be a specific intent?"

Light wrinkled his nose. "There has to be a motive; some sociopaths enjoy the process, but no one kills just for _fun_—"

Matsuda massaged his temples, grimacing. "Maybe it's a hate crime," he suggested. "There are people who view the homeless as societal pests. Maybe somebody thinks he's a new-age Jack the Ripper."

Light fidgeted, toying with the nearest available pen. "We can't exactly determine what someone's going to do at random."

"Why stop at cutting them open?" Matsuda demanded, pressing his fingertips to his sinuses now. "If you're that _sick_, why not spread their organs around and bathe in their blood a little, right?"

Light stared at him.

Matsuda dropped his face into his hands. "I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I'm just frustrated, and scared, and I haven't had a good night's sleep since Monday. It feels like there's nothing we can _do_."

Light dropped his pen on the first page of the file and nudged the end, but a wobbly spin didn't encourage Providence to point to the answer.

It wasn't too surprising, given that his college-gathering Ouija board experiences had tended to lead to such revelations as "FXALGI."

"Did you talk to anyone about getting more officers involved?" he asked.

"Almost everyone here is swamped," Matsuda explained, "but if this gets big enough, the FBI might get interested."

Light rubbed his forehead and pushed at the pen again. "How many people have to die before they find it 'interesting'?" he inquired.

Helplessly Matsuda shook his head. "I'm going to see if we can convince Mogi to help us on the side," he noted. "The man's a machine. He eats paperwork for breakfast and red tape with afternoon tea."

Light mustered an unenthusiastic smile.

"There is one thing," Matsuda remembered suddenly, turning page of the file until he reached a blurry photograph. "Somebody snapped this with their cell phone yesterday. It's hard to tell, but this is our killer."

"Angela's, at any rate," Light mused, squinting at the unrevealing mess of shadows, a hazy crowd having parted on either side to open an avenue for a solitary figure dressed in black, half-turned to look behind him, ski mask hiding everything but a strip of white broken by a pair of calculating eyes.

"There were also three pictures taken of Lawliet," Matsuda informed him, "and six of you."

Light sighed. "Bystanders," he lamented. "Can't trust them to pay attention to what's important."

"'Important' is a subjective judgment," Matsuda countered. "Evidently the majority of bystanders think you looking like James Bond is a much better photograph than some masked man on the run."

"I didn't look like James Bond," Light maintained.

Matsuda pantomimed holding a gun above his shoulder, looking dramatically first one way and then the other, and hummed the theme.

Light grinned despite himself. "No, Matsuda," he said.

"Yagami's Angels?" Matsuda asked hopefully.

"_God_, no."

—

Light needed more coffee.

He could almost invariably use more coffee in his day, but after having argued with the director on the phone for the better part of forty minutes in an attempt to get more units out on patrol—predictably, to no avail—he was even more desperate than usual.

Besides, his throat hurt now.

Taking up the _You Have the Right to Remain Permanently Silent_ mug that Sayu had sent him when he'd first made it onto the force, he headed for the break room.

Noticing Lawliet's insanely fluffy hair bobbing over his and Aizawa's desk, Light paused en route to the Fount of Glorious Mostly-Adequate Caffeine.

"Hey," he managed, striving to stay calm—and to ignore the way Aizawa perked up like a hungry dog smelling steak. "We'll be needing to talk to Matt, Mello, and Near again to see what they know about the latest victim. I don't think she was another friend of Sander's, and they may not have known her, but they're our best source of information as of yet, and they might be able to refer us to other people out there who might know more."

Lawliet nodded. "Quillish is actually leaving later tonight," he reported, "for an invention convention."

Light blinked.

"They call it that deliberately," Lawliet assured him. "But it means that we'll have very few plans this weekend, such that you would be very welcome to visit for as long as you liked, Yagami-kun."

The answer was pleasing; Aizawa's extremely evident glee was not so much.

"That would _work_," Light emphasized in Aizawa's direction.

Aizawa was very deliberately pretending to be occupied, and Light was not buying it.

Furthermore, he wasn't even borrowing it to return it later.

Lawliet smiled and popped a grape into his mouth.

Wait a second.

Something other than Light's dignity, composure, and sanity was conspicuously missing from this scene: Lawliet's candy bowl.

"Mello has been feeling ill," Lawliet explained before Light could even ask, "and Quillish blames an excess of chocolate." He tucked another grape between his lips and spoke around it. "Which I think is an impossibility at the most basic level…" He sighed. "But it falls to me to be a role model." He ate another grape. "And Quillish would take my sandals away if I rebelled."

"A fate worse than death," Aizawa commented.

"By far," Lawliet confirmed morosely. "Only Quillish would make me choose between sugar and shoes." He selected another specimen from his bunch, looking resigned.

Light shrugged and displayed his mug. "I can't talk; I get the shakes after a while."

"But people expect that of an adult," Lawliet pointed out. "Caffeine addiction is more socially acceptable."

Lawliet really didn't have any right to make distinctions about what was or was not socially acceptable when he was peeling a grape with his teeth while he responded.

"Well," Light hedged, "I'd better be off to commit some socially-acceptable substance abuse."

Lawliet smiled blithely. "I shall see you soon, Yagami-kun," he replied.

Light smiled back, eyed a painstakingly innocent Aizawa suspiciously, and retreated.

Sure enough, when he glanced over his shoulder, Aizawa was holding a hand out for a high-five.

Lawliet appeared to be pretending that he thought this meant that Aizawa wanted a grape.

—

Light was trying very hard to think like a mass-murderer.

The problem was that he was not such a despicable creature and never had been—the idea of systematically slaughtering homeless orphans, for any reason, made him sick to his stomach.

Besides, if he was going to go around killing anyone—which he wasn't, of course, but if he _was_—it wouldn't be the orphans; it would be the killers themselves. It would be the victimizers that he would victimize—the blameworthy, the bloodthirsty, the aberrant; the ones who made it unsafe to walk the streets and unadvisable to brave the dark. The people who disrespected justice, who devalued humanity, were fittest to have it introduced to them whether they liked it or not.

Wasn't there a show on Showtime like that?

Light only had as much cable as was necessary to provide the History and Discovery Channels.

At any rate, he wasn't making progress here, and the only thing that there really was to do was to sit and wait for Matsuda to get off the phone with the reporters who had gotten their sticky fingers on a picture of the body.

Light was beginning to think that cell phone cameras should be outlawed.

For the record, he had looked _nothing_ like James Bond.

—

Saturday morning, Light slept in until nine-thirty.

It was _extravagant_.

Light had been a failure as a college student; he had never been able to justify to himself being in bed past ten. There was something supremely unsettling about losing one's grasp on the morning, and it made his internal clock do strange, sadistic things.

His academic peers had in general tended to regard him as One of _Those_ Asian Kids—and perhaps he was, in some ways, perhaps in all the ways that counted. He wanted to do right by his parents, for the opportunities they'd given him; and by his professors, for their dedication to their work; and by himself, because he had seen from a very tender age just how much he had the potential to be. He had always wanted to help people, to help the world, to change it for the better, and, over the course of countless hours making silent acquaintance with the library regulars, he had come to realize that the process began with changing himself.

It was Gandhi-approved; you couldn't go wrong.

Lawliet, however, seemed as though he might be the type to utilize of his weekends for recuperation—or, at the least, he was almost certainly the type to stay up obscenely late entertaining a trio of hyperactive teenagers, only to have to make up the sleep the next morning.

Assuming one, the other, or both, Light went about acquiring coffee, reading the newspaper, and doing some housecleaning, and by the time his peace-offering cookies were cooling, it was past noon, which hopefully made it safe to journey into allied territory.

At the top of the driveway, he hefted his Tupperware, took a deep breath, thought purely professional thoughts, and braved the brisk air to head for the door.

No one answered at his knock, but, upon detecting the strains of a piano from within, he hesitantly tried the handle, and it gave.

"Hello?" he called, setting his own flip-flops neatly next to Lawliet's in the entryway.

"In here!" a young voice yelled enthusiastically back, so he followed the sound to an open, airy, beautiful living room, one wall devoted almost entirely to windows, offering a breathtaking view of the neighborhoods sprawled out below, rooftops ushering the eyes all the way to the sea—and before which a grand piano stood in all its glossy, gleaming majesty.

The boys, who were sprawled on the settee (and, in Matt's case, the rug), looked incredibly clean and contented, their hair sleeker, their eyes brighter, their smiles wider—everything had fallen into place, and actual care was treating them wonderfully well. It was a terrible cliché, but Light actually thought he felt his heart swell, the whole of his chest suddenly warm.

Lawliet, of course, was perched on the piano bench, legs unbent for once to make his feet reach the pedals, though his posture hadn't particularly improved. It was funny that Light hadn't noticed—he had a pianist's hands, long-fingered but strong, and deft, and graceful. They looked natural curved over the keys, and if the music he was coaxing from it was any indication, the instrument agreed.

Given Lawliet, it was less than a shock that it wasn't Mozart or Chopin this fine afternoon: it was A Flock of Seagulls.

And then he realized that Lawliet was singing softly, in a voice that was low, gentle, and much more passable than Light would have predicted.

"_With auburn hair and tawny eyes… the kind of eyes that hypnotize me through…_"

Something in the area of Light's already-abnormally-responsive heart went _flup_.

He chose to ignore the detail that the preceding line hinged on the phrase "a girl like you."

"I like your shirt," Matt commented cheerfully, shattering the spell, and Light's brain obediently returned from the stratosphere.

Instinctively, realizing slightly too late how slapstick it must have looked, Light glanced down at his selection, which was white with very thin blue stripes, mostly-buttoned over a black tee-shirt, coupled with a pair of khakis that had always served him well.

Matt was, at the moment, wearing a rugby-striped polo, and Light hadn't forgotten what he'd sported the first day they'd met.

There was a pattern here.

"Thank you," he said, attempting not to be distracted by the fact that Lawliet had turned to face him and drawn both knees up onto the piano bench for company.

Mello was eyeing the Tupperware.

"Do those have chocolate?" he asked.

"They're oatmeal cookies," Light answered, "but they have semisweet chocolate chips."

Mello scrambled up from where he'd draped himself somnolently over the couch, stepped forward as if baiting a rabid animal, and waited expectantly.

Light forked the container over. "They're even better with milk," he remarked to Mello's back, as its owner was well on his way to the kitchen by the time the sound waves left Light's mouth.

The mention of the beverage perked Near up fast, and Matt popped up to trail his companions, the goggles draped around his neck bouncing cheerily, and then Light and Lawliet were alone.

"They've also got a truckload of cinnamon," he added, dodging an arrow of awkward silence, "and half the sugar of the original recipe, and whole-wheat flour, and applesauce in place of much of the butter—though I left the walnuts out in case there were any allergies."

Lawliet smiled the smile that underscored the mischief in his eyes.

"Excepting the caffeine addiction, Yagami-kun seems to be a health fiend," he concluded. "Quillish may just give you a medal and promote you to his second-in-command."

"A certificate would suffice," Light replied, unable to stifle a grin.


	8. Cut and Dry

_Author's Note: UST makes the world go 'round. You know you love it._

_Long chapter is loooooong. Good thing I hate sleep._

* * *

VIII. Cut and Dry

Lawliet's eyes lit up as he bit into a cookie.

He then proceeded to cram the rest into his mouth and wash it down with milk.

Light was glad he'd had the foresight to make the cookies rather small, as otherwise Lawliet might have been in serious danger of asphyxiation.

Light realized that he was watching a bit too interestedly as Lawliet licked crumbs from his lips, so he pointedly surveyed the rest of the room as well—only to discover that Near, holding his glass in two little white hands, was gazing at him unblinkingly over the rim.

"Did you come here just to feed us cookies?" he asked when he saw that he'd garnered Light's attention. "Or was there something else you wanted as well?"

Light decided that there should be a limit on how intelligent children were allowed to be.

He wasn't entirely sure how he intended to enforce the ruling, but he would work on that part.

"I did want to ask you a few more things about the case," he explained, folding his arms on the tabletop. "I don't know if Lawliet told you, but just the other night he and I found another victim."

The boys turned to Lawliet in impressive—and unsurprising—unison.

Lawliet shrugged. "It wouldn't have made for the best topic of dinner conversation," he commented.

Light rummaged in his pocket and produced the photocopy he'd made of the picture taken at the coroner's. He smoothed out the creases so that the boys could see the girl's face, pale but peaceful where she lay on the steel slab, lips bloodless, eyes closed.

"Her name is Angela Avery," he told them. "She was nineteen, and it seems unlikely that she was connected to Sander and Billy. Did you know her?"

Matt fidgeted, Mello frowned, and Near twirled one slender finger in his hair.

"I knew her," he replied. "She used to hang around the flower shops asking for spare or rejected flowers to sell to tourists. And she knitted, too, when she could get the yarn. She and I talked more than once."

Mello looked askance at Near. "Why d'you know everybody?" he inquired.

Near directed his answer at Light: "I'm sure it comes as a tremendous surprise," he remarked, "but virtually everyone feels inclined to mother me."

There was a silence, and he sipped at his milk.

"Angela wasn't involved in anything unpleasant, as far as I know," he went on, "but as I said, we weren't particularly close. She didn't associate with Sander's group, though—she was mostly on her own."

"Presumably making the urge to take care of you twice as persuasive," Light mused idly.

Near's round face scrunched into a faint pout. "You have no idea," he muttered.

Light drummed his fingers on the table. "But she wasn't involved with any drugs or anything, to the best of your knowledge?" Near nodded, and Light tapped his fingers against his chin instead. "We keep coming back to… they must have been looking for something else…"

Lawliet raised his eyebrows—or so Light assumed; the cobweb-shadow bangs made it difficult to tell—and considered each of his charges in turn.

"I trust that none of you have gotten mixed up with any of that?" he prompted.

Mello snorted and retrieved a spare chocolate chip that had escaped to a corner of the Tupperware. "Chocolate's the only drug I'm interested in," he announced.

This, after Near attracting mothering types, was the second-greatest shock of Light's life.

Near drank more milk. "No," he said.

Everyone looked at Matt.

He shifted, glanced away, and fiddled with his goggles.

"…Matt?" Lawliet asked gently.

Matt's face went white, then pink, and his green eyes welled suddenly, shining with tears. Then he hid his face in his hands and unleashed a heartrendingly piteous wail.

"It's not my _f-f-fault_!" he cried. "And—and I know they're bad, but—but they're so _good_, too, 'cause they make me feel happy, and—and I can't usually get them, but I feel smarter and safer and better and—and—" He raised his head long enough to address himself plaintively to Lawliet, breath hitching, tear streaks smeared across his cheeks. "—and—and—I'm s-sorry! I won't—I won't again, I'll just—just—_please don't send me away_!"

Lawliet's mouth had fallen open.

Matt scrubbed hastily at his eyes, desolate and desperate both. "_Please_!"

Lawliet looked at Mello, who stared at him with equal anxiety, and then at a considerably calmer Near.

"Matt smokes cigarettes," the littlest boy reported. "When they're available."

Matt sobbed, watching for the reaction from between his fingers.

Lawliet blinked at Near, then at Matt, and then he pushed his chair back, stood, and shuffled over to lay one hand gently on Matt's head.

"I'm not going to send anyone away," he said.

Matt sniffled forlornly and peeked up at him. "You're not?"

"Of course not." Lawliet stroked his hair. "Obviously, I'd rather you didn't smoke for your own sake, but I'm hardly going to cast you out."

Matt's bottom lip quivered. "R-really?" he asked meekly.

Lawliet smiled and patted his head. "Really," he confirmed.

Smiling shakily, Matt moved to wipe his nose with his sleeve.

"Ah—!" Light cut in, snatching a paper napkin from the holder on the table to shove it urgently at him.

Matt smiled a little wider, bashfully now, accepted it, and blew his nose.

Lawliet gave him another encouraging pet.

Light pocketed the picture and folded his hands on the table. "Anyone up for a walk on the beach?" he asked.

—

In retrospect, it was nice that Lawliet had agreed without calling him on his imbecility.

_Over-intelligent brunet, above average height, aged twenty-three. Enjoys impossible cases, gallons of coffee, and long walks on the beach._

_Is an idiot._

Light shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked at the warm sand sliding about his feet, but it was difficult to stay angry with himself with the gray-blue water swelling, cresting, and breaking so close by, waves nibbling gently at the beach, ushered in with white foam hissing at their edges. Miraculously enough, the sun was out, glinting on every ripple, turning sailboats into beacons and seagulls to wheeling white kites. Clusters of kelp littered the shore, wet leaves gleaming, and lay tangled and broken amongst the rocks, and the air was almost bursting with the brisk tang of the salty air.

Lawliet, his own flip flops dangling from his curled fingers to free his feet, was contentedly monitoring Matt and Mello as they scampered around at the water's edge, playing chicken with the waves and squealing at the less-than-tropical temperature when the water won. Near stayed at Lawliet's side, maintaining a safe and wary distance from the sea currently two-toning his companions' rolled-up pants legs.

It was all so charming that Light started to wonder if it was possible to overdose on idyll.

It seemed frighteningly plausible, at the moment.

He had a sudden, overwhelming urge to take Lawliet's hand.

Fortunately, biting his tongue hard distracted his twitchy fingers, and staring intently at the sky gave him time to rethink the plan and berate himself appropriately.

And then Lawliet's breath caught, and the other man stopped short.

Near and Light each walked another step and a half before they'd finished processing the information—but when they had, they swung around fast enough that Light's head spun.

Lawliet's jaw was set, his eyes squeezed shut, his fingers clenched around the flip-flops' plastic supports. The sand around his right foot was reddening precipitously.

He opened his eyes just enough for a slice of gray to show.

"I believe," he muttered, "that I have stepped on a piece of glass."

It was funny, about _I told you so_s—they were at their most extraneous when they were the most applicable.

Light put both hands under Lawliet's elbow to steady him as he raised the wounded appendage for inspection. Sure enough, a jagged shard had lodged itself deeply in the center of his foot, and it was bleeding profusely.

Light had figured that the pleasantness wouldn't last.

He darted around to Lawliet's disadvantaged side and threaded his arm under the man's bony shoulders.

"Lean on me," he instructed, "and let's head for the car. I have a first-aid kit, and the bathrooms by the parking lot had a water supply…"

It was fairly worrisome that Lawliet had nothing cutting to say.

…Light wanted to pause to slap himself across the face, but there wasn't an opportunity.

Staggering laboriously back to the lot like the finalists of some cataclysmic three-legged-race, Lawliet's measured breath by his ear, the lean body pressing warmly against him for leverage, Light reflected that the universe was an incredibly sadistic place to live. Matt and Mello circled, moth-like, with wide, horrified eyes, Near strode alongside, twisting furiously at his hair, and a trail of blood-beaded sand stretched behind them to mark their way.

All in all, a typical afternoon at the beach for two brilliant detectives and a trio of persecuted orphans.

He eased Lawliet carefully down onto the low cinderblock wall that sustained a faucet for the purpose of washing sand off of small children. Light was about to use it for a highly-unprofessional but nonetheless reasonably delicate medical procedure.

What else was new?

Mello had caught the keys he'd tossed before Light thought to wonder what he had just asked for, giving his key-ring to a miniature maniac—but the boy was too grave-faced and frightened to pull a stunt now.

"Open the trunk," Light instructed. "It's the small white box on the floor on the right."

Lawliet managed a strained smile. "Not too small for a rather considerable bit of stupidity, I hope."

"You couldn't have known," Light responded, hesitating with his fingers centimeters away from the offending glass invader. "And think of it this way—you've saved some barefooted child a great deal of agony."

"A kindness to my country," Lawliet gritted out as Light bit the bullet, clasped the shard, and sharply pulled.

The offending article came out in his hand, dripping, a red pool swelling on the damp cement below. Light set the glass gingerly on the wall by Lawliet, then gently took the assaulted foot and guided it under the thin stream of water gurgling from the spigot, carefully washing it clean of crusting blood and clinging sand. He motioned vaguely to Mello, whom he'd half-sensed, half-noticed hovering by his shoulder. The open kit was thrust before him, and he wiped his wet hands on his good shirt to rummage for the gauze—

—which he very gracefully knocked out of the container in his haste, sending the spool bouncing to the ground to unfurl among the noxious water by the drain.

"_Shit_." He took a breath, flexed his hands, and corrected: "I mean… darn."

"Goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch?" Mello supplied with a weak smile, searching Lawliet's face for confirmation.

Lawliet mustered a grin. "Don't let Quillish hear you talk like that," he advised.

Light selected a broad bandage, which would have to do for now, rinsed the wound again, and applied the adhesive before too much new blood could gather along the line of the laceration.

For the first time in his life, looking at the paltry temporary fix, he regretted his decision not to go to med school.

Lawliet pitched his inanimate assailant into the closest trashcan with more fervor than the action required, accepted Light's offered arm, and limped back to the car, where they solemnly regrouped.

Near fastened his seatbelt. "Will that need stitches?" he inquired.

"I hope not," Light replied, checking his mirrors and backing out, irked by his own acute consciousness of the way he'd braced his arm against the back of Lawliet's seat. Now was most certainly not the time, but his powers for willful ignorance had pathetically failed. "If the bleeding doesn't stop soon, we can take a trip to the E.R. and get their opinion on the matter."

Lawliet wrinkled his nose. "I think," he said, "I'd rather bleed."

—

Luck tired of toying with their collective patience, however, and offered a reprieve: a lot of hydrogen peroxide and some clean gauze fixed the worst of Lawliet's predicament, and delivery pizza and a child-friendly comedy cured the evening of the gloom that had settled so suddenly on the afternoon.

Aiding and abetting his invalid colleague was exhausting, and Light accepted Lawliet's offer of a quick cup of tea once they'd finally shepherded the boys to bed.

Of course, it would have been downright awful of him not to insist upon actually making the tea himself, but it was still generous of Lawliet to make the gesture.

It was quiet enough in the kitchen to hear the clock counting out the seconds as they sat at the table, Lawliet with his foot up on a chair other than his own for once, and savored the warmth.

Light couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't personal and didn't sound like a come-on, so he hid his self-disgusted grimace behind the rim of his borrowed mug—which he'd selected at random, and which was from Yellowstone National Park—and resorted to the obvious solution.

"What case were you working on, again?" he asked. "Something to do with a bomb threat…?"

Lawliet scowled into his tea. "He builds ready-made bombs," he corrected, "and sells them or their components to people online and through proxies—he uses drug addicts, generally, because they'll do anything for the cash and are often prison-bound even before he gets to them. It's just that—this man, this human being—he doesn't care. He doesn't care what these weapons are used for, who uses them, who _dies_ as a result—he doesn't care if children end up with third-degree burns or worse; he doesn't care if we jail the more immediate culprit. All that matters to him is being paid. All that matters is the reward. It seems sometimes as though the world has been given over to people like this, to people who look no further than the next payoff—to people who just don't _care_."

Light rubbed at his forehead. "I don't mean to sound arrogant," he sighed, "but some days I wish I had the power to change things—to change everything. I can't help feeling like I'd do a better job of it than the people who get the chance."

Placidly Lawliet smiled. "Arrogance," he noted, "is inevitable for people like us."

Light hated that he loved the inclusion.

—

One-thirty in the morning snuck up like the ruthless ninja-assassin that she was.

"Oh, dear God," Light said blankly when he caught sight of the clock. "I guess I should have seen that coming from a mile away."

"Or an hour," Lawliet commented.

Light stood and went to the sink to wash out his mug. "Damn it," he remarked over one shoulder. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to keep you up quite this long…"

Inadvertent double-entendres. This kept getting better and better.

"Are you sure you want to leave now, Yagami-kun?" Lawliet asked. "The bars will be closing shortly, and I don't know that I'd feel comfortable letting you drive so late after such a day."

Light slotted his mug into the dishwasher and stepped forward to take Lawliet's, striving not to brush the other man's hand with his. "I'm sure I'll be fine…"

"We have an extremely wonderful couch," Lawliet persisted, smiling so genuinely that Light's refusal stuck in his throat.

"I'd hate to impose," he improvised.

"Not at all," Lawliet returned, hopping up and hobbling off with startling alacrity for someone in his circumstances.

Light stared at the water overflowing from Lawliet's mug, running over his fingers, and swirling down the drain, and wondered what, exactly, the world had planned for him next.

"Here, Yagami-kun," Lawliet bid from the other room.

Light flicked off the kitchen lights and followed the sound, discovering that Lawliet had laid out sheets and blankets on what did, in fact, look like a couch fit for a king.

When he received a pair of spare pajamas and a clean toothbrush, Light couldn't help but start to wonder if perhaps Lawliet wasn't a little _too_ prepared for this—as if he'd hoped for it all along.

—

He and Lawliet were in the alley where they'd first found Angela, though there wasn't a body now—just the two of them, standing together, looking idly at the ground.

Then he glanced up, searching for Lawliet's face, and saw instead that the other man held his hands out in front of him, palms up, a deep diagonal slash cut across each one.

"Lawliet!" he reprimanded. "What are you…"

He took Lawliet's hands in his, blood collecting in those pale palms now, dribbling between the slim fingers and drawing stark lines down the narrow wrists. Blood everywhere, on everything, staining shirts and skin, and Light's own hands were slick with it as he tried to staunch the flow—

A slow-moving horror cinched around his heart and clambered up his throat, and it choked him as he met Lawliet's eyes.

They were losing focus—glazing over, going still.

This time Light looked down, where he saw the thickening red line betraying the gash that bisected Lawliet's chest.

_Nonono oh God no please not you—_

Light's eyes snapped open to a dark room.

His heart was rattling around his ribcage like a pinball going for the high score, and he had to sit up, sheets crumpling around his waist, and gasp in air to breathe properly.

A few long seconds of frantic self-reassurance and adjustment to the blue-white glow of the nightlight tucked tactfully by the wall stabilized him, but the shuddering terror sent aftershocks trilling up and down his spine. Just a dream. Just a nightmare. Just his subconscious being a total bastard for no good reason, like it had always loved to do.

Struggling to shake it, Light slid out of the bedclothes and padded down the hall towards the bathroom Lawliet had pointed out, feeling for the wall to direct him in the dark. He found the doorframe, gently shut himself inside, flipped the light-switch, and stared at himself in the mirror, expecting something to pop up behind him and slit his throat at any second.

He planted his hands on the countertop and concentrated on breathing slowly. He needed to be part of the solution right now.

Obligingly, as if with a hint of an inadequate apology, the water from the tap warmed up quickly, and he splashed his face four times and mopped off the excess with the first towel he could reach. A tap to the switch plunged the bathroom into blackness again, and he fumbled his way back out to the foyer, where the couch was waiting, unassuming and unchanged.

He hadn't been sitting, head in hands, for long before he heard the telltale _tat_ of bare feet on the hardwood.

"Yagami-kun?" Lawliet called softly. "Are you all right?"

"Fine," Light answered—which was, by this juncture, at least partially true. "What are you doing awake?"

Lawliet sat down not far away, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping both arms around them.

"I have somewhat severe insomnia," he replied. "I've just begun with a new medication, but… it and I have not become accustomed to each other yet."

Light wondered if, perhaps, that was what the endless quantities of sugar were for—overcompensation.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he managed. "That must be… difficult at the best of times."

Lawliet's curled form seemed to shrug. "You do what you can," he responded, "and that's all anyone can ask."

Light nodded and fought the instincts telling him to look at Lawliet's hands—to confirm that they were whole.

A strangely tranquil silence reigned, and then Lawliet unfolded to the floor.

"Shall I leave you to it, Yagami-kun? Is there anything I can get you before I do?"

"I'm fine," Light repeated, "but… thank you."

He could barely see Lawliet's smile in the darkness, but barely was enough.

"You're welcome, Yagami-kun," Lawliet promised. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," Light offered, settling again.

And maybe it could be good, one way or another. Maybe it would.


	9. Many Meetings

_Author's Note: I was up until a quarter to two finishing this for a timely update. Giving me grief about the content is grounds for a thorough sakujoing._

_Eltea's been way too busy being awesomer than me to beta these lately, so we'll just have to put up with my mediocre self-editing. XD_

* * *

IX. Many Meetings

When Light stirred, shifted, and awoke, there was a round white face with huge gray eyes six inches from his nose.

He stifled a mortified howl and scrambled backwards as far as the couch would allow, gathering the blankets hastily around him as if they would protect him from…

Near.

Light stared at the boy where he sat cross-legged on the floor, gazing placidly back.

"Good morning," Near offered. "I was waiting for you to wake up."

"How long have you been _sitting_ there?" Light demanded.

"Not too long," Near answered, more enigmatically than Light would have liked. "Will you make us pancakes?"

Light's heart rate had mostly returned to normal. "Pancakes?" he managed.

Near nodded sagely. "I believe it's relatively traditional to indulge in more extravagant breakfasts on the weekends…?" he prompted. "I was hoping you might be persuaded to make something for us."

Light scrubbed a hand across his eyes and attempted to work his legs and set his bare feet on the floor. "Don't trust Lawliet with the stove?"

Near gathered himself to his feet as well, somehow delicately and awkwardly at once. "He has enough trouble with the microwave," he replied. One finger crooked around a curl, wrapping it about the knuckle. "You could make waffles instead, if you wanted."

"I'll make both," Light decided, folding the blankets and setting them on the arm of the couch, "if you have a waffle iron."

Near trailed interestedly as Light headed into the kitchen. "Mr. Wammy has lots of things in the cupboards, but I haven't had time to index them all…"

Light started opening cabinets. "Help me out, Near," he urged. "Find me a big glass bowl first."

When the scent of sizzling batter, sweetened by the vanilla extract Light had unearthed among the spices, made its misty, mischievous way down the hall and sidled through the gaps beneath the doors, it was only a matter of moments before Lawliet made an appearance.

Or, rather, his even-more-tousled-than-usual head did, peeking around the doorframe to examine the proceedings.

"Yagami-kun never seems to run out of hidden talents," he remarked.

"Near helped," Light replied, gesturing with the spatula to where the boy was sitting at the kitchen table, swathed in an apron that trailed on the floor, and slicing strawberries. There was a smudge of flour on his cheek, though of course you had to look awfully closely to distinguish it from the rest of his skin.

Lawliet smiled. "May I help as well?"

Light pushed a plate heaped with steaming pancakes at him. "You can help eat," he suggested.

Lawliet seemed to be pretty pleased with that arrangement.

He'd made his way through three strawberry-topped pancakes by the time Matt skidded in, wide-eyed and anxious.

"Mello's sick," he said.

There was a poignant pause, and then Light thanked his lucky stars that he'd just finished a batch of pancakes, which made it possible to twist the stove dial to the _off_ position, move the frying pan to an inactive burner, and hasten after a racing Lawliet and a Near clutching the bulk of the oversized apron to his chest.

Mello was curled up in his bed, blond hair plastered across his forehead, his face eerily pale where it was visible around the comforter that was drawn up to his shoulder.

"I'm feeling better," he promised weakly.

Matt, standing to the side, was twisting nervously at his pajama top, which was green with a splash of black stars on the front. "That's what you said ten minutes ago, Mel."

Mello still had the strength to scowl. "Yeah," he countered, "but I mean it this time."

Cautiously, Lawliet sat down on the edge of the bed and brushed Mello's hair back, clearing it out of his eyes. "What sort of 'sick' is it?" he inquired. "Stomach-sick?"

Mello nodded, squirming a little closer to Lawliet, who considered the situation before asking softly, "Is there a reason why this might have happened?"

Mello flinched, and Matt blurted out, "He had a chocolate bar!"

Lawliet turned to Matt slowly, as if he hadn't expected this advent all along.

"Shut up, Matt!" Mello wailed.

"No chocolate's better than you being sick!" Matt protested.

"Nuh-uh!" Mello retorted.

Lawliet set a hand on Mello's arm, and the boy obediently quieted.

"I," he said, "of all people, know quite well how difficult it is to refrain from eating sweets first thing in the morning—or all the time—but if it's making you ill, I have to encourage you to prioritize your health. Does that sound fair?"

Mello sniffled. "I guess," he mumbled. Then he frowned, then he cringed, and then, with blotchy pink flaring in either cheek, he scrambled out of the bed with a "'Scuse me" and bolted.

The bathroom door slammed shut, and Lawliet sighed, holding out an arm to Matt, who immediately scampered over to redeem his hug.

Near wasn't above taking one, either.

Light stifled the part of him that wondered when his turn would come.

—

Light was back on pancake duty by the time a much heartier Mello padded into the kitchen.

Near swallowed a perfectly square bite of pancake and commenced cutting the next. "Feeling better?" he asked.

Mello wrinkled his nose at the apron draping past Near's dangling feet. "You look like you're wearing a dress," he declared.

"He's fine," Near decided.

Setting a plate in front of Mello, Light reflected that a few minutes of puking did sometimes work wonders.

Lawliet started collecting the dishes when the boys tossed their forks down and went stampeding up the stairs to brush their teeth, the condition they had to meet before being allowed to go play Frisbee in the backyard.

Light insisted on taking the stack of plates from Lawliet, who reluctantly let him undertake to clean up his host's home in favor of returning to the table to make short work of the rest of the strawberries.

Most people didn't believe Light when he told them that he actually enjoyed this sort of thing.

Lawliet smiled as the return of the elephants' footsteps on the stairs segued into yelling in the yard.

"They love the Frisbee," he explained. "And the bikes Quillish bought them the other day. I daresay we're spoiling them rotten," he mused, "but given the lives they've lead until now, I can't bring myself to put a stop to it."

"They're good kids," Light replied. "And they're not going to waste the opportunities you're giving them; they know better than that." He smiled, too, as he loaded the dishwasher. "I think it's a really wonderful thing that you're doing for them."

Lawliet pushed a fingertip around in the water and strawberry juice that had collected in the bottom of the plastic container. "Quillish is trying to get the adoption papers," he divulged quietly. "He knows a lot of people. He'll be back Tuesday, and he said he'll try to make some phone calls before then. It's difficult, because they have very little in the way of documentation, and I'm concerned that we may not succeed."

Light toweled off his hands and joined Lawliet at the table. "Don't think like that," he suggested. "Isn't there at least a little interviewing in the process, even in circumstances like these? You and Quillish are perfect for them, and they adore you. If there's any justice in the world, that's going to count for a great deal."

Lawliet nibbled at his right thumbnail. "'If,'" he murmured.

Light ran a hand through his hair, which was in need of a thorough shampooing; he was acutely noticing this morning's lack of a shower. "You'll charm them," he promised. "And if you'll excuse me just a moment, I'm sure I'll be a bit more charming myself once I've got some proper clothes on."

He figured it would be true—even if they _were_ yesterday's clothes. None too surprisingly, Lawliet's borrowed pajamas wanted something of refinement.

Lawliet blinked, all big eyes and hovering thumb. "I suppose," was the verdict. "But those do look rather nice on you, Yagami-kun."

Light tried not to blush like a schoolgirl in a television serial; he honestly did.

It was futile, but at least he tried.

—

When Light returned a few minutes later in yesterday's outfit—berating himself for failing to consider the possibility of bringing a spare one before concluding that such a preparation would have been too creepy altogether—he proffered the borrowed pajamas, folded neatly like the sheets.

Light liked folding things. There was nothing wrong with that.

Lawliet smiled and accepted the bundle, cotton rustling softly against his palms. He set it idly on the table, and there was a long moment of fairly awkward silence, in which Light slid his hands into his pockets, and Lawliet gazed raptly at the clock, which was tallying the seconds much too slowly.

Then Lawliet frowned.

"It's quiet," Light realized.

"At the risk of sounding like a low-budget horror film," Lawliet muttered, voice going tight as he swept to the nearest window with a view of the yard, "_too_ quiet."

This silence wasn't long enough—it shattered, and Lawliet was striding past him to take the stairs two and three at a time, calling as he went to order Light to check the front.

There was no one on the driveway, no one out back—Lawliet's face was grim as he hit the ground floor again, darting into the kitchen to pluck a Post-It note off of the fridge, jamming it into Light's breast pocket without so much as a by-your-leave en route to his flip-flops by the door.

"That's my cell phone," he announced. "Call me if they come home."

"I'm not staying here," Light informed him, stepping into his own sandals as he spoke. "I'll try the beach; you go the other direction."

Lawliet looked at him for four full seconds and then nodded.

"Call me in fifteen minutes either way," he instructed as he herded Light outside. "In case I've found them."

Light nodded too, strode to his car, unlocked it, slid in, buckled up, and backed down the drive, Lawliet a blur of silver and white in his rearview mirror, a splash of black hair rippling in the wind before he disappeared.

Light's knuckles ached where his fingers were clenched around the wheel, and he knew he wasn't driving particularly well—indeed, he was quite aware without the helpful assistance of a few horn-happy motorists who were practically tailgating him anyway. He ignored them in favor of scanning both sides of the road to the best of his ability, looking for red, yellow, and white, but the innumerable clusters of children never included the truant trio that he sought.

There was a spot of vibrant color by a convenience store—but no, that was a girl, pigtails swinging.

Light didn't think he would mention this particular mistake to Mello.

He was sweating cold by the time he'd forged through traffic to the beach, ten of his fifteen minutes having elapsed—but wait—there were three small bicycles meticulously locked at the rack in the parking lot they'd used yesterday, and he couldn't be sure, but—

Light slipped his Accord into the first space he saw, damned his seatbelt to hell more than once, fought free of it, and jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

But _yes_—yes, there were three little figures to match the bikes, separated from the bulk of the beachgoers by some distance, two of those forms climbing on the boulders that bridged the gap between cliffs and sea, the third sitting on a lower rock with his knees up beside him.

Light hoped briefly that Lawliet had found the only piece of glass in the expanses of the sand, snatched both of his flip-flops in one hand, and, uninhibited, ran until he could make out the stripes on Matt's shirt—just to be sure.

Then he fumbled for the Post-It and dialed.

Thirteen minutes.

The line clicked immediately.

"Have you found them?"

"Yeah," Light answered, trying not to pant audibly. "At the beach."

Lawliet sighed, and the relief that poured into Light's eardrum was almost thick enough to be tangible.

"I'll meet you back at the house," he said.

"Got it," Light replied.

It was weirdly refreshing that Lawliet didn't waste time with formalities before hanging up.

Light put his sandals back on to cross the rest of the way to the boys.

"Pardon me," he interjected, "but I think Lawliet would prefer you to be supervised."

Mello, ever the showman, leapt from his perch and landed, with a small explosion of sand at impact, on all fours like a cat.

"We got bored," he declared.

"Mello thought the air here might help his stomach," Near corrected in a mumble that didn't pass without a glare.

"I'm _fine_," the blond insisted again.

"Either way," Light cut in, nervously watching out of the corner of his eye as Matt clambered down much less gracefully than his cohort had, "can't you play in the yard?"

Mello kicked at the sand. "We're used to going where we want," he muttered.

"Things are different now," Light told him, slightly surprised at his own sudden gentleness. "And we have to be especially careful given what's happened. Lawliet gets really worried about you—and what would Mr. Wammy say if he came back, and Lawliet had lost you all?"

Mello ducked his head, but not before Light saw guilt flash onto his features.

"Whatever," the blond concluded, but he started trudging towards the car without any further protest.

—

Lawliet was waiting to help unload the bikes, and when that was done, he demonstrated a superhuman ability to hug three children at the same time.

Light was more than a bit impressed.

"You're welcome to explore the city," Lawliet told them, "but _please_—just ask one of us to go with you. We'll be perfectly willing."

Ten minutes saw a flurry of promises and apologies, at the end of which Light found himself making tea again as Lawliet rummaged in the fridge for further strawberry supplies, a precious bunch of terrors having galloped up the stairs to verify Matt's assertion that he could beat the next level of some video game that fell outside Light's range of cultural consciousness.

When they had both succeeded in their tasks, he and Lawliet sat wearily down at the table again, side by side.

Lawliet cradled his mug, eyes on his strawberry prize.

"Thank you, Light-kun," he said.

Light attempted to hide in the steam issuing from his cup. "You're welcome, Lawliet."

Lawliet selected a piece of fruit, smiling faintly. "I have a first name," he noted.

"I figured you must," Light replied—bashfully, it had to be admitted. "I've just never heard anybody use it."

"I prefer Lawliet. My first name is… abnormal…"

Light sat back, grinning ruefully. "You're talking to Illumination Boy."

Lawliet smiled again, wryly this time. "True."

Light folded his arms, giving the other man ample time to choose his words.

Lawliet chose, all right.

"I suspect," he began, blowing on his tea, "that my parents never really wanted me in the first place. They were… jetsetters, of a sort, I suppose—wandering feet, bitten by the travel bug; pick your favorite platitude. Infants and airplanes, let alone infants and adverse climates, aren't exactly suited to each other, and I… can't help but imagine that they were more disappointed than anything else." He sipped, watching ripples spread. "They left me with nannies and babysitters most of the time, often for considerable stretches. I remember that period intermittently, and I don't believe I liked it, but there wasn't much of a choice." Lawliet set down the mug and fingered the handle, as if it might yield up the answers. "I was… four and a half when their plane went down over Chile. There were no survivors." He lifted the mug to sip again, delicately, and Light utilized the reprieve to swallow a dozen questions. "Quillish was my mother's brother, and he took me in immediately. I don't know where I'd be otherwise." He met Light's eyes for the first time since starting the narrative, and there was something of a dark, bitter humor in his gaze. "They named me L. Just the letter; nothing more. I guess they expected something more, and they were describing the incompletion that they saw."

"L," Light repeated, uncertainly at first. "L…" He pursed his lips and slowly shook his head, smiling. "No, I like it. It… fits you, somehow. Unconventional and uncompromising."

Lawliet fiddled with the edge of the strawberries' plastic container, the corners of his lips curling upward almost despite him, a touch of pink in his cheeks.

"L," Light said again, lower and more softly now.

Once more Lawliet raised his eyes, and Light read everything in them.

His mostly-steady hand brushed Lawliet's jaw, settling against a warm neck, feathery hair dark and smooth about his trespassing fingertips, and they drew closer in odd little jerks, uncannily synchronized; none of this was any less unnerving for its inevitability. Light forced himself to breathe, as Lawliet was doing gently but all too perceptibly against his mouth, and a few fingers fluttered against his arm, nothing but fragile fabric shielding him from them—

There was a tactful cough.

The speed with which Light and Lawliet broke apart would most likely have defied the expertise of a slow-motion camera, upon which they would have been visible only as a pair of blurry streaks moving in opposite directions.

Near was looking pointedly at the linoleum where he stood in the doorway, face averted, and, judging by the heat rising steadily towards his forehead, Light was fairly sure that his own face was going to ignite.

An irresistible glance revealed that Lawliet wasn't faring much better.

Light's colleague, however, managed to clear his throat and beckon to Near, coherently enough, and even mustered a sheepish smile. "What's wrong?"

Near shuffled over and stood between them—more, Light thought, for protection than to make a point.

"I didn't want to mention it in front of Mello," he said, "but someone was watching us at the beach."

Unfortunately, Light had enough law enforcement experience to know very well that any pedophile in the world would give an arm and a leg for a chance to sink some predatory teeth into any of these boys—but something potent and immovable in his gut told him that this incident was not a coincidence.

Near turned his pale face up to search Lawliet's above him.

"I'm scared," he told his benefactor, sounding almost confused.

Lawliet wrapped both arms around him.

"So am I," he sighed, giving Light a meaningful look over Near's unruly hair. "But I swear to you that it's going to be all right."

Light raked a hand through his hair and turned to the best solution he knew.

"Near, can I get you some tea?"

—

An hour later, Light had returned to his apartment, and his coveted shower was finally within reach.

Something crinkled as he shed his shirt, and he retrieved the Post-It note.

He just looked at the number for a long time—probably longer than was remotely necessary to memorize it, let alone to determine what it was.

If he smiled to himself as he set it down on the nightstand, surely it was only at the prospect of a hot shower at last.


	10. What They're Calling It

_Author's Note: My family's going on a road trip for the next two weeks… I'll try to have an update prepared if not available, but I can't make any promises, and I'm afraid you're stuck with me now. XD_

_I was up until almost four working on this one and had to finish it this morning. I die, Horatio. XD But much love goes out to Eltea for betaing it for me when I couldn't bear to look at it anymore. :3_

* * *

X. What They're Calling It

Light was having a lot of trouble focusing on the newspaper.

In his defense, someone had written in to the advice columnist from Kissimmee, Florida.

It was times like this that Light was convinced that the universe had it in for him.

He huddled over the usual first coffee cup of the day, reveling in it, feeling his brain shake off sleep and stand to attention, and went to great lengths to pretend that he didn't notice a burgeoning craving for tea.

On the way out the door, he double-checked in the mirror that he wasn't wearing a color that would draw unsettling suspicions like disoriented butterflies. Sure enough, this shirt was blue—just blue. Light blue (he cringed inwardly), but none of the fey sky blue that lurked in his wardrobe, which was almost as bad as _pink_.

The sad thing was that Light looked excellent in the fey sky blue; it brought out his eyes.

Minor chromatic tragedies aside, Light had a workplace to go to and a job to do, and no one could criticize anything in his raiment today.

—

"You're smiling," Aizawa observed incredulously.

Light blinked, shifted his weight, and frowned. "No, I'm not," he countered, unoptimistic about the presumable trajectory of this conversation.

"You were," Aizawa persisted. "You never smile when you walk in; today you were smiling straight out of the elevator." His eyes widened and then lit up, and Light resisted the urge to cower in terror. "What _exactly_ happened this weekend to make you so happy to come in to work?" Aizawa inquired sweetly.

Sweetness was the last thing Light needed to be thinking about.

"Sorry to disappoint," he managed to deadpan, "but we didn't do anything more exciting than eating cookies and taking the kids to the beach."

Aizawa grinned wickedly. "Is that what they're calling it these days?"

He shortly changed his tune to a more amused than apologetic "I was kidding!" directed at Light's retreating back.

Light pointedly ignored him.

On the upside, his coffee mug ("_There was no Boston Coffee Party for a reason_") wouldn't insult his integrity any time soon.

…not even when he actually _was_ withholding information.

As far as Light was concerned, however, his personal life was his business and his alone, even among individuals who had worked rather hard to set him up with the root of the problem.

Unfortunately, as Light soon discovered, the files on his desk and a barrage of new emails weren't any more conducive to concentration than the newspaper had been. All he could think about was Lawliet—him and Lawliet—the pair of them together, with the tea and the strawberries between them; Lawliet's hand warm and tentative at his shoulder; the soft, dark hair greeting his fingers… He took the moment, played it, replayed it, rewound it, and played it again, in the painstaking slow-mo usually reserved for action movie stunt scenes.

There were far too many capital Ls in this email. Its author should be shot.

Preferably in painstaking slow-mo.

The dubious propositions of a few spam emails weren't helping, either.

Wisely, Light decided to close his email program and focus on the coffee instead.

Hot, hot, coffee, steaming gently in his face, like fingertips against his cheeks.

Emphatically, Light applied the heel of hand to his forehead.

Somehow, he waded through a few pages of paperwork without lapsing into any particularly detailed fantasies, at which point he scrubbed his eyes, reordered his pens, and glanced up in time to see Matsuda approaching.

The man's heavy stride spoke wonders.

"Another one?" Light prompted desolately.

Matsuda set a series of folders down next to Light's mug.

"Another three," he said.

Numbly Light spread them out and flipped open each cover in turn. There were three photos to greet him—three crime scenes, three sites of carnage. The first held a tangle of bloodied yellow, the second a paler blond, the third a matted brown that looked coppery as he angled it for examination, and Light's stomach clenched unpleasantly at the eerie similarity to a trio that he recognized, sending coffee sloshing into something like a whirlpool.

"I thought it was supposed to be good things that came in threes," he noted, less steadily than he would have liked.

"Small consolations do," Matsuda replied. "One, I made a few phone calls this morning when I got these. Two, I got through to an FBI agent who wants to help out. Three, she's tying something up in Sacramento, and she said she can be down here by this afternoon."

Light turned the pictures over, scanning the reports beneath. "It's too big for us," he agreed, not as reluctantly as he would have imagined a few days before. "Same killer, same methods, same nothing we get out of it." He met Matsuda's gaze. "Fresh eyes and new resources could do us a world of good."

"Can't hurt," Matsuda confirmed. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs aside and then letting them fall back into place. "See if you can compile the case files before she gets here—and I was thinking it might help to make her a map pinpointing the locations of the murders as well, since she doesn't know the city." A tiny hint of the trademark boyish smile flitted across Matsuda's face. "I know how you love color-coding."

Light rolled his eyes indulgently. "It's a useful habit," he responded. "Organization is not a crime."

"You should hire yourself out," Matsuda suggested. "You could attack people's houses and make some money on the side."

"It's not 'attacking,'" Light countered. "And the only person's house I've ever cleaned is Lawliet's, and that's just because half the dishes were mine."

He realized what he'd said when Matsuda suddenly looked as though Santa Clause had walked into the room, bearing a pony with his name on it.

Light opened his mouth to offer half a dozen justifications, but Matsuda winked before he could find the words.

"Don't let him take advantage of your services," was the recommendation. "Make sure you're getting something in return."

Light grimaced. "We talked about the _case_," he announced, feeling like a broken record already. "There were no '_services_' exchanged."

This, of course, only tickled Matsuda more.

"They grow up so fast," he sighed. "Pretty soon you'll be color-coding the children."

Light threw an eraser at him.

The really terrible part was that color-coded children kind of sounded like a good idea.

—

Whoever had placed Aizawa's and Lawliet's desk between Light's workspace and the copy machine was a truly sadistic soul.

He wanted to slap himself for noticing that the boys essentially _were_ color-coded, and he hadn't even had to lift a finger.

The other thing he noticed was the conspicuous absence of both Lawliet and Mello.

Aizawa caught his arm and hauled him in close enough to speak without a doodling Matt and a paperclip-chain-making Near overhearing every word.

"Mello wasn't feeling well," he muttered, "and went to the restroom. Ten minutes later, Lawliet went to check on him—and that was more than five minutes ago."

Light frowned, handed him the files destined for the copier, and started after their pair of disappearances.

He stepped into the bathroom and eased the door shut after him.

"Lawliet?" he called.

Before he could ask after the other object of his search, there was a terrible retching sound, underpinned by a reassuring murmur, both of which were followed by an answer from a middle stall:

"Here, Light-kun."

Tentatively, Light moved over to assess the extent of the damage.

What he found within the unlocked stall was Mello, pale and shaking, slumped beside the toilet bowl, and Lawliet sitting with him, stroking nimble fingers through his hair.

"Oh, Jesus," Light heard himself say.

"It's good that you're here, Light-kun," Lawliet replied. "Could you convey a message back to Shuichi for me? I had just found evidence to indicate that we might be able to follow a shipment of hazardous materials that the LAPD was tracing, which might have gone to our bomb-maker's workshop, which is incredible, because he's usually much more surreptitious—"

"You tell him," Light instructed, having lost the thread of the sentence almost instantaneously. "I'll hold the fort."

Lawliet gave him a long look—long enough for surprise to melt into a deep appreciation.

Light felt his cheeks going a bit pink. It wasn't as though he was making some great sacrifice.

Which was not to say that this was going to be the slightest bit enjoyable.

Lawliet edged his way out of the stall, making room for Light to settle by an enervated Mello, whose breath came in uneven gasps.

"I'll be back as soon as I can," Lawliet promised. "Light-kun will take care of you, Mello."

"I know," Mello mumbled, almost to himself—and the absolute trust in the statement made Light's heart swell even as his stomach turned.

Speaking of stomachs, Mello's was distinctly discontented, and it made its position known.

Hurriedly Light gathered Mello's hair in one hand, holding it out of the way at the base of the boy's neck, and employed his free hand to rub the poor kid's back in a manner that he hoped was encouraging.

Mello was rather too preoccupied with vomiting profusely to articulate a thank-you, but Light didn't exactly grudge him for it.

When he'd finished, Mello swallowed, swiping at his mouth with the crumpled toilet paper Light had the foresight to provide, and looked up at him.

His eyes were wide and horrorstruck.

"I feel awful all the time," he whispered, breath hitching softly. "I—d'you think—am I going to die?"

The bacteria massing their forces where his knees touched the tile, the inescapable smell of sick, the clamor of germophobic anxiety at the back of his mind—all of it disappeared as Light seized Mello's narrow shoulders and pulled him fiercely into a hug.

"Of _course_ not," he answered. "You're going to be fine."

—

It was only a few minutes later that he emerged again, still clutching the warm, frail body close to his—this time to carry a weak but steady-stomached Mello back to where a harried Lawliet was gesticulating wildly, chewing on his thumb, and apparently attempting to show Aizawa a computer program more complicated than he'd thought it would be. He looked up and cringed, then scrambled past his partner, who seemed to be vacillating between intense frustration and utter cluelessness.

"Better?" he asked the boy curled up against Light's chest, legs dangling over one arm.

Mello managed a bleary nod.

"I was thinking I could drop him off at your place," Light noted, "but Mr. Wammy isn't back yet, is he?"

"Not until tomorrow," Lawliet confirmed, raking a hand through his hair, not that it needed the help. "I could take off the rest of the day—"

"Don't you dare," Aizawa cut in. "I can't make any sense of this." He motioned to the computer screen, then held up his hand before Lawliet could speak. "Let me call my wife," he said. "I'm sure she'll be willing to keep an eye on him and spoon-feed him ginger ale."

Light wasn't entirely sure that, even ill and incapacitated, Mello would let anyone spoon-feed him anything.

Then again, the boy would probably take chocolate in any form in which it came.

—

Eriko Aizawa, whom Light had met and chatted with at more than one office barbeque, smiled as she opened the door.

"Hello, Light," she greeted him, ushering them in. "And you must be Mello."

"Nice to meet you," Mello murmured from where he'd half-buried his face in Light's side, staggering along with Light's arm around his shoulders.

"I set some Sprite out on the counter when Shuichi called," Eriko informed them, leading the way through a house as warm and welcoming as her demeanor, "so just let me know if you're thirsty, sweetheart. I've got some salt crackers, too, and plenty of water."

Mello trudged along at Light's side until they reached a spare bedroom where the curtains were drawn and the bedcovers had been folded back.

"Yumi's at school," Eriko explained, beckoning to Mello, who broke away from Light and gratefully collapsed onto the waiting bed, "and the little one's napping. I've put our old baby monitor in here—" She motioned to the square receiver perched on the nightstand, a red light indicating its readiness. "—so if you need anything, all you have to do is say so." She tucked the comforter in around Mello, who was already settling on the pillow and letting his eyes fall shut. "Okay?"

"Yeah," Mello mumbled. "Thanks…"

As Light and Eriko retreated, he reiterated the sentiment.

"I can't thank you enough," he told her. "He hasn't been well the last few days, and we just can't take any chances."

"It's my pleasure," Eriko replied. "There isn't much else I can do to help keep the city safe, but I'm more than happy to take a little off your hands so that you can."

Whatever else he could say about the man, Light did have to vouch for Aizawa's taste in women.

—

Speaking of women, when Light returned to the office, there was a very pretty one waiting—one wearing a leather jacket, her long, dark hair draping over her shoulders. She stepped briskly forward to shake his hand, and he saw that there was an inconspicuous but lovely diamond ring on her third finger of her other hand.

"I'm Naomi Misora," she said. "Touta's given me most of the details, but he mentioned that you were working on a map that might help me get my bearings on all this."

"Yeah," Light confirmed, smoothing slightly compulsively at his tie. "Though I'm afraid I haven't got all the files that I wanted for you; one of our witnesses started throwing up."

Naomi gave him a strange look, and Light hid a small smile. Even when he wasn't around, Mello could disturb all and sundry.

When he'd equipped her with the gloriously color-coded map and had offered a few more details, Light hastened back to Aizawa to collect the files he'd meant to copy.

Aizawa passed them to him without ceasing to stare at the screen, chewing on his lip. Near was hovering by his shoulder, attempting to explicate the system, and Lawliet grabbed Light's sleeve before he could escape.

"Light-kun," he began.

That got Aizawa's attention.

"It's 'Light-kun' now?" he asked interestedly.

Lawliet ignored him. "May we talk?"

Aizawa was ecstatic; Near sighed feelingly.

"Is that what they're calling it these days?" Aizawa took up eagerly.

As Lawliet clasped Light's sleeve between thumb and forefinger to drag him off, Light fought the urge to give Aizawa the finger in front of a pair of children.

It was a pity that his backup plan—sticking out his tongue—wouldn't have been much better.

When they were a safe distance down the hall, Lawliet divulged, "I'm concerned about your FBI agent."

Light blinked. Naomi was hot, but he wasn't exactly going to…

"Being a federal servant of justice, I'm afraid that she might be legally obligated to interfere in our unofficial custody of Matt, Mello, and Near."

Oh.

"Don't worry about it," Light told him. "She's here on her own time. The Bureau didn't send her; it was Matsuda's persuasive powers."

"They are formidable," Lawliet muttered. He touched a thumb to his lip. "Well, then."

Before Light could move, Lawliet had stepped forward and slung both arms around him in an odd hug that was every bit as awkward as it was wonderful.

"Thank you, Light-kun," he said.

"Of—of course," Light stammered out, laying a hesitant hand on Lawliet's back before the man could dart away.

As Lawliet wandered back to his desk again, Light wondered how exactly he was supposed to work in these conditions. He was starting to think that, if he wanted to be able to concentrate ever again, he and Lawliet needed to hash a few things out.

…if that was what they were calling it these days.


	11. In Short

_Author's Note: My beta is in Europe, presumably partying it up and making out with French boys. (Or, you know, sightseeing. XD) Buuut an extraordinarily wonderful human being we call Jenwryn went through this for me, and you all must join me in sending oodles of love in her direction. :3_

_I'm going to try to update again in a week in order to get us back on the old schedule, but goodness knows what might happen between now and Saturday. XD_

* * *

XI. In Short

Two heads with very big eyes appeared over the edge of Light's desk.

Fortunately, they were still attached to their respective bodies.

Light smiled distractedly and went back to indexing all the details Naomi had asked for, cross-referencing them with his absurdly meticulous case report.

"Light?" Matt said.

Light kept skimming, running a tally in his head. "Yes?"

The boys were gazing at him imploringly; he heard it in their silence.

"It's past five o'clock," Near announced at last.

"That's nice…"

There was another silence, for the duration of which Matt and Near continued to gaze at him imploringly until he couldn't stand it anymore and had to put his pen down.

"What's wrong?" he prompted, significantly more attentively this time.

The faces that had materialized across the desktop blinked piteously.

These two were well-educated in the ways of the puppy eyes.

"It's five-thirty," Matt took up, "and Lawliet's still working."

Before Light's brain could embark on too much of a tangent about Lawliet's inspiring dedication and persistence, Near cut in.

"But we need to pick up Mello," he pointed out, "and Mr. Aizawa may develop homicidal tendencies if he has to stay here working with that tracking program any longer."

Light envisioned Aizawa embarking on an anti-technological rampage, taking a sledgehammer to all devices unlucky enough to require computer chips, leaving a trail of sparking wires and shattered silicon in his wake.

It was frighteningly easy to picture.

Light shunted his papers into his briefcase, herded his pens by his computer monitor, straightened a crooked straggler, and got to his feet.

"We wouldn't want that," he noted, "would we?"

Matt and Near trailed behind him as Light draped his coat over one arm and made his way through the emptied office towards Aizawa's and Lawliet's desk.

Its occupants were still in residence, all right—Aizawa squinting at the screen with a truly priceless grimace, Lawliet perched on a chair beside him, curled up with chin on knees and arms about them, his bent elbows giving the position a bit of a vulture-ish look.

Light wondered if finding vulture poses cute was cause for a psychiatric evaluation.

Lawliet broke off in the middle of an explanation to blink up at Light. "Is it time to go, Light-kun?"

Aizawa looked up, glanced around, flung his files into a backpack, snatched his jacket, and started for the door shouting, "_Shotgun_!"

Lawliet smiled thinly as he unfolded from his chair. "I suspect Shuichi may be slightly tired of this stage of the investigation," he remarked, rummaging for his messenger bag.

"I suspect you may be understating for humorous effect," Light replied innocently.

"I suspect the two of you should elope while the eloping's good," Matsuda interjected airily, appearing from nowhere to saunter past them for the elevator.

"How does he _do_ that?" Light managed to demand, staring after his partner, who had apparently spent his lunch break learning to teleport.

Lawliet merely grinned behind his thumb.

—

In just over two hours, Light had driven to the Aizawas', deposited Shuichi, recovered Mello, shipped the crew back to the house at Pacific Heights, picked up Italian takeout for everyone whose stomach was sound, ferried it to its intended recipients, hit the nearest convenience store for ginger ale, brought _that_ back, retreated to his apartment, and cracked his briefcase open on the kitchen table.

He stared down at its contents. Perched upon the central sheaf of papers was a cheerful and very familiar teabag.

The Post-It note beside it read, _Don't stay up too late_.

Light bit his lip on a smile.

­—

The first hour after that was easy, the second was a struggle, and Light reluctantly gave in to an incredibly assertive impulse at five minutes to ten.

It was rude to call past ten, after all, and that would have defeated the whole point of his decorous gesture.

It was unsettling that most decorous gestures did not result in him sitting cross-legged on his bed, dressed in his pajamas, gripping his cell phone and staring at Lawliet's phone number as if it was an encoded message telling him that he was a lovesick idiot.

Which he wasn't, of course, so it was a good thing that it didn't say that.

He would have ask his physician about the recurring bouts of increased heart-rate, which were presumably the sign of a cardiovascular irregularity, rather than being a side effect of the more mundane illness that he definitely didn't have.

This was all very stupid, himself most of all.

Light ran his hands over his face, punched in the appropriate numbers, and hit the button with the little green phone on it, calming himself by force of will as the line rang once… twice…

"Hello, Light-kun."

"I hope I'm not calling too late," Light began. "Do you have a minute?"

"I have a series of them," Lawliet rejoined, smirking slightly by the sound of things. "What can I do for you?"

Matsuda's commentary about equal exchanges of services chose that moment to return to Light, who attempted to push the thought from his brain—and then to kick it viciously down the stairs for good measure.

In the meantime, he settled with responding, "I just wanted to see how Mello was doing. Is he feeling better?"

He imagined Lawliet nodding amiably, and the fact that he could already interpret the other man's silences was more than a little unnerving.

"He says he feels better than he has in days," Lawliet explained. "He was watching Matt play video games for a while, and they're all sleeping now."

"I'm glad to hear that," Light said, and he could have sworn he actually felt one of the knots in his shoulders unravel at the news. "I also wanted to thank you for the tea."

This time, he visualized Lawliet grinning like a contented cat.

He was much too good at this.

"I expect that you must have enough coffee to flood a mid-sized river system," Lawliet was remarking, "but I wasn't sure about the state of your tea supplies."

"They're pitiful at best," Light answered. "I appreciate the help."

"You're welcome to it."

There was a pause, the entirety of which Light passed in wondering if this situation was awkward or not.

He supposed that if he had to ask, it probably was.

"Are we not going to have phone sex?" Lawliet inquired.

Light changed that _probably_ to a _definitely_ and threw in some _dear God what the hell just happened_.

"…excuse me?" he coughed up after a few seconds of battling his vocal cords.

"I thought that might be what this was leading up to," Lawliet mumbled, having the grace to sound embarrassed. "It's a bit late, and you wanted to know if I had time, and the boys are asleep, and Quillish is still away…"

It took Light a moment to realize that the sound currently issuing from his own mouth was laughter.

He had assumed that it was a horrified wail that would segue into a eulogy for his lost dignity, concluding with an agonized crescendo into complete hysteria, but apparently that wasn't the case.

"Who do you think I _am_?" he asked, the pointed query somewhat undermined by the detail that he hadn't _stopped_ laughing yet.

"Hopefully still Light Yagami," Lawliet returned. "Or I'm in even deeper trouble."

"You're not in _trouble_," Light retorted. "You're just in_sane_. I mean, I don't even know how to _have_ phone sex, so—" Light had never learned how to quit while he was ahead. Or while he was behind. Or at all. "—ah—that would be—a setback."

It took him another moment to notice that he had not said that he wouldn't have _wanted_ to engage in telephonic carnality if he _had_ been versed in its ways.

Perhaps this was why you weren't supposed to call people late at night.

"We're both very intelligent," Lawliet mused. "Most likely we could figure it out."

"What if Near comes asking for a glass of water?" Light inquired. "He seems to have perfected his timing."

"That would be unpleasant," Lawliet murmured in agreement. "Perhaps we should postpone this conversation until a better opportunity arises."

It was not Light's fault that 'arises' sounded a great deal like another applicable word.

The English language had it out for him tonight.

"Good plan," Light decided before his vocabulary could throw any other punches. "I'll see you tomorrow, then." He elected not to add _and have great difficulty looking you in the eyes_. "Goodnight, L."

Lawliet paused, and Light had time to hope desperately that he hadn't done something wrong.

"It sounds nice," Lawliet told him, somewhat haltingly; "when you say it."

He hung up—which Light had to admit was a surefire strategy for getting the last word.

Finding, very oddly, that he didn't care, Light set his cell phone on the nightstand and flopped down on the bed, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes and trying not to grin like a fool.

—

"You're happy again," Aizawa observed as Light made a distinct effort to stroll inconspicuously past the other man's desk.

How did Aizawa get here before him every day, anyway? That took superhuman punctuality, to say the least.

"I'm miserable," Light countered, refusing to slow his stride. "I'm putting on a brave face."

"Keeping it together for the kids?" Aizawa asked innocently.

Torn between rolling his eyes and slapping his forehead, Light settled for tossing himself down in his desk chair to wonder whether Aizawa was an accomplished sadist or a masochist with an elaborate death wish.

Maybe both.

He didn't have much time to contemplate the matter, however, as Naomi was evidently an early riser as well: she stalked into the room as if she owned it and took a seat across from him.

"There's a pretty distinct pattern here," she concluded of the thick folder in her hands, the one he'd given her the day before. Laying it open, she began to spread crime scene photos across his desktop. "Adolescent boy. Adolescent boy. Young woman, blonde. Three more boys: blond, blond, brunet. They're looking for someone in particular—a boy with yellow hair."

Light pushed his bangs out of his face. "Have you met Mello?"

Naomi shifted, crossing her legs. "Who's Mello?"

Light offered a thin smile. "A boy with yellow hair."

Naomi twirled her pen. "One of your witnesses?"

He nodded. "If Lawliet's here, you can talk to them for yourself."

Decisively, Naomi clicked her pen shut. "I might see about that. Is Matsuda in?"

Naomi's departure bestowed on Light three hours of precious peace—an allotment he used wisely, tying up more than a few loose ends from older cases and designing a very intuitive chart of the possibilities for the weapons employed in each of the murders.

Two minutes after noon, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. One glance at the caller ID confirmed that Lawliet wanted his attention.

"Hello?" Light prompted, trying to keep his head down.

"Do me a favor?" Lawliet asked.

Given the tenor of their previous phone conversation, Light wasn't entirely sure how to respond.

Slightly frantically, however, he reasoned that they were in the _office_—even Lawliet, who had the social sensitivity of a housecat, would know better than to make an inappropriate request in these circumstances.

He would at least wait until lunch hour.

Light tried very hard not to feel like a hopeless victim of his own infatuation as he answered, "Name it."

—

Light wanted very badly to chew on the end of his pen.

Nobody would notice a little nibble.

Except for Matt, Mello, and Near, whom he was supervising while Aizawa and Lawliet staged a raid of a warehouse in the city, the final destination of the chemicals shipped to the bomb-maker central to their case. Lawliet had called Light the moment they'd beaten their tracking program into long-awaited submission, and by the time Light had ventured to his colleagues' desk, Lawliet had been holstering his gun.

Light had been determined not to find the image as attractive as Mello did awe-inspiring.

He had not succeeded.

In the hour since Lawliet had left, casting reassurances over one shoulder, Light had pushed the attractiveness problem to the backburner in favor of fiddling with his office supplies and struggling to focus once again. He had given Near all of his spare change to stack and sort on the desktop, and Matt and Mello were on the floor, Matt playing with Mello's hair where the blond had laid down with his head in the other's lap, so his only real distractions were… his own personal hangups, silver fishhooks snagging at the back of his mind.

He set his pen down, picked it up, and aligned it next to its varicolored brethren.

How was it that, in one week, he and Lawliet had gone from ignorance of each other's very presences to questionable late-night conversations on the phone? It was almost the fluidity of it—the ease of falling into Lawliet's company, of acculturating to his habits, of being in his _house_—it was almost this bizarre naturalness to the whole thing that frightened Light the most. Sure, there were butterflies and fireworks dueling in his stomach (the fireworks had been winning the last time he checked), but glorified moths and a couple sparks were no guarantee of anything.

He was waiting for something to go wrong. He was waiting for the heady flavor of it to sour; for the road to take a disastrous turn; for insect corpses and sulfurous smoke.

He was waiting for himself to take something wonderful and fuck it up.

And where would all of it end up then? He'd have gambled on a hand full of useless cards, disconnected hearts and diamonds to mark another bitter failure in the world outside of work.

And yet… Lawliet wasn't like the people who had come before—he wasn't like anyone, and he knew it, and he didn't mind. Lawliet was brilliant and smug and irretrievably eccentric, and he didn't bother to hide any part of himself. What Light saw of him was what he would be getting, and, if the foreign objects metaphorically bouncing around in his internal organs were any indication, he was liking what he saw.

He was just… scared. And scared of the fact that he cared enough to be scared at all.

This was all presuming, of course, that Lawliet survived the encounter towards which he had so merrily frolicked from the premises.

Light needed coffee.

And a lobotomy.

—

In short, Lawliet survived.

Furthermore, he burst back into the office looking so pleased that the spritely aspect of his being, prominent in the pointed chin and the wide, bright eyes, was magnified even more intensely than was usually the case.

Light did not find that attractive either. Not at all.

"Did you get 'im?" Mello wanted to know, leaning on Matt to sit up and rub his eyes.

"No," Lawliet said cheerfully.

Light opened his mouth to ask.

"But we did apprehend a young man who claims to have worked for him," Lawliet declared, "who may be able to lead us to his home."

"It's looking excellent," Aizawa reported, grinning as though he'd uncovered pictures of Light and Lawliet consorting in a sketchy club. "Which is why we're all going out tonight, drinks on me."

Mello looked inordinately excited.

"Well," Aizawa amended hastily, "all of us who are legally allowed."

Mello pouted.

Light considered the merits of doing the same.

"Shuichi promises me that it will be fun, Light-kun," Lawliet coaxed.

"I bet you're a _hilarious_ drunk," Aizawa put in. "Just imagine yourself without any inhibitions."

That, of course, was precisely what Light was afraid of.

He would be finding a way to get out of this one, and anything short of faking his own death did not sound excessive.

Come to think of it, faking his own death was starting to sound appealing.


	12. Priorities

_Author's Note: It's not fanservice; it's filler! …wait, that came out wrong._

_How do I love the Task Force? Let me count the ways._

_Thanks to Eltea for the beta! :D_

* * *

XII. Priorities

The worst thing—arguably; there were a lot of contenders—was that he wouldn't have a chance to change his clothes.

Socializing and slaving away for the betterment of society were, ideally, two different spheres, and Light tried to treat them as such. The bar and the office were not the same thing, and walking into the former dressed for the latter was like painting "I'll drink until I forget how bad this week was" on one's forehead in neon.

The neon was even more effective when clubbing was involved; black lights accentuated it nicely.

There were a few parts of post-work bar stints that Light did enjoy however, including the fact that, upon reaching a critical volume of alcohol, Matsuda would listen to conspiracy theories like this specimen for hours.

And Light did have hours of them to tell.

He wouldn't be raving about Elvis's underground bunker tonight, however, because his salvation had come in the form of the two most beautiful words in the English language:

_Designated driver_.

Mogi had also been appointed to the post, because even after Mr. Wammy had picked up the boys on his way back from the airport—including a reluctant Mello plied with promises of action movies and ice cream—with Naomi in addition to their regular numbers, Light's car didn't have enough seats to transport them all.

Somehow, he was less surprised than he would have liked when Matsuda, Aizawa, and Naomi all piled into Mogi's Mini Cooper the second they reached the parking lot, leaving Lawliet as Light's only passenger.

They exchanged glances. Behind his thumb, Lawliet looked very amused.

Light led the way to his Accord, twirling his keys around his index finger. "Naomi's awfully quick on the uptake," he remarked.

"I think a blind tortoise could follow their lead," Lawliet replied as he climbed into the passenger seat.

"I think that's giving tortoises too much credit," Light muttered, turning the key in the ignition.

Lawliet seemed to be contemplating the idea as Light followed the packed Mini out of the lot and onto the street, though the issue didn't stop him from drawing both knees up to his chest, his heels resting on the seat, and reaching out to consult the wisdom of the radio.

He paused momentarily when it advised them to "Run to the Hills"—which sounded to Light like the safest possible strategy—but only settled for good when another station offered input from Light's antithesis, a band called The Darkness.

The song, of course, was "I Believe in a Thing Called Love."

Light resisted the urge to slam his forehead down on the steering wheel, traffic accidents be damned.

"What do you have against classical music?" he asked.

"Nothing," Lawliet answered idly. "But you can't listen to one radio station all your life."

Yeah, Lawliet twisted Light's dials, all right.

Maybe _that_ was what they were calling it these days.

Preoccupied with slapping himself mentally, Light noticed only belatedly that he had been following Mogi's Mini along a route he didn't recognize—Matsuda wasn't leading them to the usual bar.

All too soon, Light understood the discrepancy as a sign appeared by a different establishment.

It read _Karaoke_.

Touta Matsuda was the Devil, and they were all very, very doomed.

Lawliet, Light noticed, looked intrigued.

Howling from the speakers, Justin Hawkins wasn't helping. "_I wanna kiss you every minute, every hour, every day_…"

Light was going to crash his car into a storefront any second now.

—

Evil incarnate beamed at them as they entered via the attached restaurant, Light feeling vulnerable without the tie and jacket he had abandoned in the car in the vain hopes of looking as though he belonged here.

"Like it?" Matsuda asked.

_I would like it if you flung yourself onto a flaming pyre of cocktail napkins doused with vodka and gasoline,_ Light thought.

"This is a very interesting place," Lawliet answered for both of them before Light could channel the general sentiment into a more courteous turn of phrase. Sure enough, Lawliet was peering around at everything, enchanted by the patrons, the waiters, the deejay, the décor, the lights, the barstools, and—in particular, Light noted, hiding a smile—the menu.

Lawliet's fascination with it was such that Light chanced a peek over the other man's hunched shoulder, at which point he realized that his coworker's thrall was merited.

—

An excellent meal followed, and they split the bill like regular colleagues—the sort who didn't divide homicide paperwork much the same way—and got a good laugh out of Naomi's assurances that her contribution wouldn't come from their tax dollars.

Lawliet had ordered himself a massive lava/mudslide/choose-your-own-cataclysm cake, in the face of which his spoon looked rather inadequate, and had just begun to dig into it when Matsuda made a survey of their corner booth.

"Is everybody ready for the first round of drinks?" he inquired. "I know I am. What are we in the mood for?"

"I'd like to see what they have," was Naomi's verdict as she pushed her chair back and stood. Aizawa concurred, and Matsuda looked to Lawliet.

"What can I get you on Shuichi's dollar?" he asked cheerfully.

Lawliet managed to pry a portion of his attention away from the chocolate fudge sauce, albeit only enough to blink ambivalently.

"He'll be happy with anything sweet," Aizawa assured Matsuda, starting towards the bar. "Mogi, can we borrow you to help bring it all back?"

Just like that, Light and Lawliet were alone at the table.

Light suspected a conspiracy.

Nevertheless, he didn't intend to waste the opportunity.

"L?" he prompted. "Can we talk?"

Lawliet blinked at him as well—and then took pink tongue to silver spoon, sending Light's stomach through a grueling acrobatic routine.

"What do you want to talk about, Light-kun?" he asked.

Light glanced in the direction of the bar, but the others were still engaged in the process of choosing their poisons.

"I was hoping," he explained, struggling not to fall into the vast gray eyes, "that we could talk about… us."

Lawliet blinked again—which was remarkably distracting; he had the loveliest eyelashes—and then gazed at his dessert.

"Do we have to have this discussion _now_?" he wanted to know.

Surreptitiously Light examined the contents of Lawliet's plate, but there didn't seem to be anything especially time-sensitive about a mound of chocolate. Admittedly, the ice cream had started to melt.

"We might not get another chance this evening," he pointed out. "They're all cops, and between the four of them, they're not likely to miss much."

Lawliet's eyes went even wider, and his bottom lip crept outward.

"But I have _cake_," he said.

Light sighed to concede defeat. "What you don't have," he muttered as Lawliet happily returned to the food, "are priorities."

There wasn't long to brood before the drink-mongers returned, Mogi bearing something very, very pink.

He set it down in front of Lawliet, and Light stared at the glass, then at the culprit.

"You got him a _Shirley Temple_?" he demanded.

Matsuda winked. "A Dirty Shirley," he corrected. "Don't worry; we'll see him wasted yet."

"After that," Aizawa added, the picture of innocence, "he's all yours."

Light wondered why it was that he worked with a bunch of lunatics.

Perhaps there had been some small print under his job description.

At a great deal of enthusiasm from the whole of the table, Lawliet forsook his precious cake long enough to sip at the corrupted child-star beverage, and his pale eyes lit up.

"Mikey likes it!" Matsuda crowed.

"Mikey's liver won't," Light commented under his breath.

The others had just started to get acquainted with their brown bottles when a generic ringer blared from someone's phone.

"Shit," Naomi said, snatching it out of the pocket of her jeans and flicking it open by her ear. "I'm sorry, babe, I forgot."

Light couldn't hear the voice on the other end over the hubbub of the restaurant, but it didn't take five police officers to figure out that 'babe' probably meant the source of the ring gleaming on her third finger.

"I'm having a beer with the guys," Naomi was reporting. "I'll…" She rolled her eyes. "Sweetheart, they're all accounted for."

If it had been a better time, Light would have protested vehemently. Being second to _cake_ did not qualify as 'accounted for' in his book.

"It's just work stuff," Naomi continued before he could interject. "I'll call you when I get back to the hotel, okay? I love you."

Everyone made a distinct effort not to look expectant as she hung up, but Naomi took a long swig from her bottle and indulged their curiosity.

"Raye's the best guy I've ever met," she explained, "but he's a little insecure. Almost every single one of his ex-girlfriends cheated on him, some of them more than once, because he trusted them too much."

"Or not enough," Mogi murmured. "Maybe after a while, feeling like he assumed they were up to something made them want to prove him right."

Naomi paused. "I'd tell him you said that," she remarked, grinning slowly, "but then he'd never let me out of his sight."

"Speaking from experience," Aizawa cut in, waving his left hand to show his wedding band, "just… don't rush it. You've got the rest of your lives."

Naomi sat back contentedly. "I'm counting on it," she replied. "I've got a whole lot of baddies to bust before I settle down and learn how to cook anything that requires more than the microwave."

"Holy crap," Matsuda said.

Alarmed, everyone followed his gaze.

"Holy crap," Aizawa agreed.

Lawliet was blinking again, and he'd finished every drop of his drink.

"Let me get you another one of those," Matsuda volunteered, taking the glass. He stopped to give Light a hopeful look. "You could have _one_ beer."

It was slightly depressing—and very telling—that Light wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if Matsuda and Aizawa had begun a bet about whether or not they could get him to drink.

As far as he and Lawliet were concerned, there was probably an office pool.

"No, thank you," he said.

"C'mon," Matsuda coaxed. "Just one won't get you anywhere near the legal limit. Besides, you're a _genius_—if anyone can figure out how to drive tipsy, it's you."

Light massaged his temples. "Intelligence quotient and alcohol tolerance are completely unrelated."

"He's trying to confuse you with his superior vocabulary," Aizawa warned.

Matsuda frowned reproachfully at Light. "Don't tell me you don't miss the glory days," he declaimed. "I'll bet you were a total frat boy back in the day."

Light smirked and swilled his water glass. "About the wildest I got," he noted, "was playing Fresca pong with my tennis friends."

Matsuda sat down again, covering his face. "The boy has never played beer pong." His voice was muffled. "I give up."

Lawliet was looking hungrily at Matsuda's unattended beer. "What's Fresca?" he inquired.

Light moved the bottle out of the way. "Soda," he answered. "More specifically, the lovechild of Sprite and Satan."

"I'm leaving," Matsuda announced. "Possibly to go jump off a bridge."

"Can you get me another drink first?" Lawliet asked, a bit too eagerly for Light's tastes.

—

In just over an hour, Light was attempting to be inconspicuous in the back of the room as Lawliet swayed in time to the karaoke song he had selected after a great deal of thought.

Lawliet's hair fluttered wonderfully as he bounced, and then he took up the microphone and sang in the surprisingly clear voice Light remembered from Saturday at the piano.

"_Haven't we met? You're some kind of beautiful stranger… You could be good for me; I have a taste for danger_…"

Why did it have to be Madonna?

Light was torn between hiding and making a point of not looking mesmerized.

"_If I'm smart, then I'll run away… But I'm not, so I guess I'll stay—heaven forbid I take my chance on a beautiful stranger_…"

This was a bit like a reversal of one of Light's recurring nightmares—except that, in the dream, Light had to sing "Like a Virgin" on pain of death, and he was almost always naked.

"_I looked into your eyes, and my world came tumblin' down_…"

Light really could not afford to imagine Lawliet singing naked.

It was very tempting to put his head down on the table and try to stop existing, but there was an extremely ambiguous puddle in the best available spot.

Four endless minutes later, a great deal of applause ushered Lawliet back to the table hosting Light, Mogi, Matsuda, Aizawa, and Naomi—their colleagues clapping loudest of all. For his part, Light had elected to focus on finding sanity-salvation alternatives to the most obvious solution: drinking vodka until he couldn't remember his address, let alone the uncanny warmth seeping through every inch of him at nothing more than Lawliet's smile.

It wasn't long before his phone vibrated in his pocket, and he drew it out, concerned.

The text he had received read, _I think I'm drunk, Light-kun_.

Light looked to Lawliet, who occupied the seat _directly beside him_, but the other man wouldn't look back.

Sighing inwardly, Light tapped out his reply: _I'm sitting right next to you._

_I am acutely aware of that,_ Lawliet fired back.

Light rolled his eyes. _So why aren't we having this conversation out loud?_

Lawliet cleared his throat. "Very well," he acquiesced. "I think I'm drunk, Light-kun."

"I never would have guessed," Light said.

"Be nice, Light-kun," came the reprimand.

"Nice guys finish last," Light returned.

"Not in team sports."

"Life isn't a sport."

"I disagree."

Light raised an eyebrow. "What sport is it, then?"

Lawliet paused. "A… marathon."

"A marathon," Light repeated, fighting a traitorous grin.

"…a marathon in which you die at the finish line."

This time Light's lips twitched despite him. "That's incredibly morbid."

Lawliet gave him a beleaguered look. "I told you, Light-kun; I'm _drunk_."

Light gave in and laughed.

He hadn't meant to lean in closer to Lawliet to do so, but before he knew it, he could smell the sharpness of the liquor on the other man's warm breath. Their eyes met, and Lawliet's glinted in the ambient light.

Then Matsuda's head inserted itself between them and began to sing, partially on-key.

"_Can you feel the love tonight? It is where we are_…"

"Tomorrow," Light noted, "I am going to enjoy singing to _you_ when you're so hungover you can't see."

Matsuda drew himself up to his full height.

"I," he declared, "am immune to alcohol."

—

Shortly, Matsuda was demonstrating his immunity in the parking lot by executing a frighteningly sound performance of the Soulja Boy dance.

"I know part of 'Single Ladies,'" he enthused as Mogi nudged him towards the car. "Does anyone remember that Ciara song '1-2 Step'?"

Light supposed he should consider himself lucky that Lawliet was a very docile drunk, though there were white fingers on the radio controls before Light had even made it to a main road.

Light wasn't sure what was worse—the fact that the Seal song "Waiting for You" greeted his ears, or the fact that he could identify it immediately.

Music was not on his side tonight, but stoplights were, and they reached Pacific Heights in record time.

It was only in the driveway that Lawliet paused.

"Do you think I'll get alcohol poisoning?" he asked.

Light smiled a bit. "Not if you haven't thrown up yet," he noted. "But drink a lot of water. And hope that Quillish has invented a hangover cure."

Lawliet seemed a little disoriented—or as if he was waiting for something.

Light leaned across the parking brake, set one hand against Lawliet's neck, and kissed the warm forehead as best as he could around all the hair.

"Go," he instructed.

Contentedly, Lawliet went.


	13. Geniuses at Work

XIII. Geniuses at Work

Light's phone vibrated enthusiastically where he'd set it on the nightstand. Marking his place in the latest pointless horror novel, he put the book down on the bed beside him and reached for the phone.

He had a text from Lawliet. It read, _LIIIIGHT-KUUUUN_.

Light rubbed his eyes. _What? _he tapped out.

He set the phone by his hip, and, predictably, the moment he opened the book, it buzzed again.

Lawliet's answer: _Nothing_.

Light shook his head, trying not to grin. _Go to bed_.

He had just enough time to turn a page before Lawliet responded, _I can't; Quillish says I have to drink two litres of water first. TWO LITRES._

Light had to admit that this was an extraordinarily well-punctuated bit of drunk-texting.

_Drink it as tea,_ he sent back.

There was a pause, and just as he was about to put the phone aside, it received a reply:

_You ARE a genius._

Light smirked, rejoining, _Tell me something I don't know_.

He left the inactive phone next to his pillow as he brushed his teeth, and by the time he returned, it had registered another message in his absence.

_I think you look nice in pink. Goodnight, Light-kun._

Light was probably grinning so stupidly that he no longer merited the label, but he found it difficult to mind.

—

Lawliet was sitting on a scaffold high above the city, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms around them, humming softly to himself.

Belatedly, Light realized that his ability to make this observation implied that he was _also_ sitting on that scaffold—a scaffold which was swaying dangerously in the gusting wind, old boards creaking vaguely in time with the melody Lawliet had taken up.

"This is a bad idea, L," Light announced, remarkably rationally given the way he was clinging to the nearest available portion of rusty metal frame.

"Maybe," Lawliet permitted.

"I'm pretty sure it's bad," Light replied, feeling the structure's supports shudder violently beneath him.

He was also pretty sure that they were going to die.

On the upside, he could see the Bay Bridge from here.

"Do you trust me, Light-kun?" Lawliet asked. Unaffected by the wild motions of the scaffolding beneath, he clambered to his feet and held out one white hand.

Light hesitated, looking at the pale outstretched palm.

But not for long.

"Yes," he said, and took the offered hand.

He'd meant to say _What the hell does that have to do with our imminent demise_, but he supposed that _Yes_ would have to do.

Lawliet helped him up and smiled. The wind tore at the man's incorrigible hair, and his storm-cloud eyes were bright.

"Jump," he said.

The jaw-drop that Light executed at the word would have been really funny if he had been somebody else. "You're insane!" he cried.

Lawliet smiled.

Then he leapt, and Light fell with him.

Rather than introducing his forehead to the distant cement, Light sat up abruptly in his bed, disheveled, discomfited, and fearing for his life.

After a bit of strategic deep breathing, it struck him that Lawliet had been humming another Madonna song—a little ditty called "Ray of Light."

He introduced his forehead to his palm instead. His unconscious mind was such a _douche_.

—

At five minutes to nine the next morning, Light was at his desk, debating whether to use the "Keep your day job" mug or the one that read, "At least it's not heroin," when the namesake pattering of a pair of flip-flops caught his attention faster than he would have liked.

A surprisingly wakeful Lawliet was holding something out to him, and for a moment, Light did nothing more than blink at the white box he was being given.

Then he took it, resisting the urge to shake it like a long-awaited Christmas present.

"It's Mello's chocolate bars," Lawliet declared, efficiently ruining the surprise, as he shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. "Matt gave them to me this morning and told me to hide them so that Mello wouldn't eat any more."

Light blinked again, but the maneuver failed to elucidate the situation.

"Why give them to me?" he inquired.

Lawliet looked around, presumably for spies. "If Mello calls asking after his chocolate," he answered, "I want to be able to tell him in all honesty that I don't have it."

Light raised his eyebrows, which he hoped would prove more effective than the blinking had been. "Creative," he decided of the ruse.

There was more than a hint of mischief in Lawliet's smile. "Picking the right words makes all the difference," he replied. "What you say is often significantly more important than what you actually mean."

"Lawliet!" Aizawa's voice called from the direction of his desk. "Could you please get your marshmallow cereal off of my sensitive documents?"

"Oh, dear," Lawliet murmured. "The list of my food-related crimes lengthens."

"Maybe you should offer him some of the marshmallows," Light suggested.

Lawliet looked at him as if he had a cereal box for a head.

"Or you could eat them all yourself," Light revised.

Lawliet seemed to approve of that plan, and, nodding his assent, he turned to go.

Then he paused, smiling idly this time. "Light-kun also looks nice in blue," he noted, and then he wandered off.

Light picked up one of his mugs and set it down again. Lawliet had said one thing, presumably meant another, and thrown a box of stolen chocolate into the deal.

At least the latter didn't _quite_ count as taking candy from a baby.

Light opened the box, which, as promised, contained the remainders of Mello's chocolate bar supply: the ones with the gold foil, which he'd been nibbling on since the first day he'd arrived.

Examining the exterior, Light noticed a plainly-printed expiration date set for December, indicating that the chocolate inside should have been eaten almost two months ago. Perhaps that explained Mello's tendency to sacrifice the contents of his stomach to a porcelain altar.

Light wondered absently where the kid would have come by something like this—he'd probably found it in the Dumpster behind a restaurant somewhere, on one of what had to be a very many such expeditions, and celebrated his good luck.

Sighing, Light shoved the box into one of the drawers of his desk, thinking that perhaps he should toss it into the trash like its original owner had done. It had evidently been there for a reason.

—

As the day wore on, Naomi roamed the office, lost in thought, and Matsuda stopped by, looking pale but resilient, to give him a few more files. When the clock hands started creeping into his lunch hour, however, Light gave in and got up. He needed coffee.

It wasn't a matter of _wanting_ at this point; his veins were crying out for caffeinated reassurance. He was neutral on the idea of food, but the coffee break portion of the program was mandatory.

He selected the "Heroin" cup to make a point.

…to himself.

This was exactly why he needed that caffeine.

Aizawa and Lawliet occupied the table in the lunchroom, considering the broad fan of papers they'd spread across it. Lawliet was picking all the marshmallows out of his box of cereal as he looked over a transcript, and Aizawa was sorting through black and white copies of IDs and photographs.

"How's it going with your witness?" Light asked.

Judging by the extremely pessimistic expressions the question earned, not well.

"He's not talking?" Light hazarded, offering a sympathetic cringe.

"He's talking, all right," Aizawa responded, rubbing at his eyes. "It's just that he doesn't have anything to say. He's a mercenary, and Bosworth—Richard Bosworth; that's our guy—didn't tell him anything he didn't need to know." He pinched the bridge of his nose, glaring venomously at the lights. "Hello, Square One, did you miss me?"

Shuichi Aizawa, police detective, had clearly reached a personal low, because the next thing he did was to take Lawliet's cereal box and start eating by the handful.

Lawliet looked slightly betrayed, but instead of retaliating by repossessing Aizawa's Tupperware of leftovers—which was what Light would have done—he gathered himself to his feet, only to gaze down at his toes for a full ten seconds before he spoke.

"Light-kun," he managed, peeking through his bangs, "might I have two minutes of your break?"

"For you," Light answered, struggling with a grin, "two and a half."

Smiling behind a hovering thumb, Lawliet led the way to an unpopulated hall, where he paused again.

"Would you like to have that discussion now?" he asked.

Light wished he couldn't hear his heartbeat quite so clearly in his ears—it sounded like it might be loud enough to drown out Lawliet's voice.

"About us?" he prompted, unnecessarily he knew. Maybe Lawliet's allotted hundred and fifty seconds would elapse if he stalled enough. He didn't feel so brave now, in the light of day.

Before Light could flee the premises and try his luck with something rabid and annoyed, Lawliet nodded, pushing his hands into his pockets and watching the toe of his sandal kicking at the floor.

"Network television makes me inclined to distrust office romance," he said.

A twig from laughter's family tree died in Light's larynx.

"But I—" Lawliet had curled his fingers into fists, and he drew his shoulders around him for a shield. "I… like you. I like being with you. I like talking to you, except right now, when I can't get anything to come out right. It's just that…"

Either the carpet had turned to Renaissance art, or Lawliet was having as much trouble trying to face Light as Light was having trying to look away.

"I doubt," Lawliet muttered, body folding around him even more. "I question it in ways I shouldn't; I try to tear it apart, because—because finding you and Matt, Mello, and Near all at once seems too _easy_. Because entropy is the only universal law, and things aren't supposed to fall into place. Because I've never been unhappy, and I've never suffered, and I've never earned anything this… wonderful."

Some truly horrible impulse reanimated the corpse of the broken laughter in Light's throat, and it emerged a very different beast.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said.

Lawliet raised his head. His eyes were guarded, and his smile was grim. "You'd never know it if you did."

This wasn't what Light had wanted. This wasn't how he'd expected it to go. He'd anticipated something more like _Circle 'yes' if you like me back_, but shattered boards and twisted steel were raining to the ground.

He stepped forward. Maybe the floor was lava, at this rate.

"L," he persisted, quietly but convinced, "you're the strangest person I've ever met, but you make more sense than anyone I know."

Lawliet cracked a gentler smile. "I can't believe you wash my dishes," he said.

Light grinned. "I can't believe you let me." He took a deep breath, possibly the deepest of his life, and held out his hands. "Can we try?"

Lawliet stared at them—but not for long.

The warmth centered in Light's palms spread to the rest of him faster than science should have allowed.

"I think we owe it to ourselves," Lawliet replied.

Light couldn't figure out which of them was shaking, and seeing his own reflection in Lawliet's eyes made him forget to try.

Someone coughed.

Light half-thought Near might have walked all the way from Pacific Heights solely for the purpose of interrupting this conversation, but it was Matsuda who stood waiting when he turned without letting go of Lawliet's hands.

"Shuichi's eating all your cereal," was Matsuda's report. "And Naomi thinks you might be able to trace Bosworth by the equipment that shows up in some of the pictures."

They'd disentangled their phalanges by the time they joined the others in the lunchroom, but Light was still reeling as if he'd been slapped.

The mother of all emotional roller coaster rides would do that to a guy.

He squinted at one of the photos that had drifted to the edge of the table, folding his arms to occupy his hands.

The roller coaster plummeted through a hole in the track.

"This is a mold," he said, jabbing a finger at the object, at the shallow cubes set in the metal. "This is a mold to make chocolate bars."

Lawliet froze.

And then he knew.

"He hid it," he intoned. "The bomb component he was shipping was to sell, and he hid it for its buyer to collect. It's in the _chocolate_—chocolate that he left in the trash behind the bakery where Sander's body was found; chocolate Mello took; chocolate that you could check for if you knew the contents of someone's stomach; chocolate you could see if you cut them open collarbone to navel—"

"He's been tracking people that match Mello's description," Light cut in. "Then he saw them at the beach, and he found three kids that looked like them—he made it all seem like senseless carnage, but he was _looking_—"

"Mello's been sick because he's been ingesting chemicals meant for making _weapons_," Lawliet interjected, the words beginning to blur in his eagerness. "When he stops, he feels better; when he throws it up, he gets a little of it out of his system, and he starts to recover—"

"The murder weapons were all _industrial_—"

Lawliet stared at him in disbelief. "We've been working on the _same case_ all along."

Light grabbed Lawliet's shirtfront, hauled him in, and kissed him.

Hard.

Lawliet tasted like strawberries with a marshmallow cereal chaser.

This was a staggeringly beautiful kind of oblivion.

When a few inches of air saw fit to slide between them, the blinding madness of the moment faded just enough for Light to gauge the damage.

Lawliet's tongue slid over his lip as if he was trying to catch the last of the flavor, and the room was pin-drop silent except for their faint breathing.

It was at that point that Naomi piped up, "Encore!"

Lawliet's eyes narrowed, his wet lips curling into a dangerous smirk as ten fingers grasped Light's tie and dragged him in to give the girl her wish.

Light thought he might drop dead from the combination of humiliation and utter glee, but that was okay, because he'd done everything he'd ever really wanted.

—

"We still don't know where Bosworth _is_," Light was recapping as Lawliet packed his things to leave, "but I can't even get upset about it. Everything else is _there_." He was looking at Lawliet's hands. He should stop doing that. Then again, it was better than looking at Lawliet's mouth. "And Naomi said she might be able to get a lead on some of the machinery, and it's not like there are too many manufacturers of heavy-duty chocolate molds—"

"You're babbling," Aizawa informed him charitably.

Light managed an apologetic grin. "Sorry. I'm excited."

"Shock of the season," Aizawa replied.

"I'm ready, Light-kun," Lawliet interjected before things could get too far out of…

Light wasn't even going to think it.

—

The house was dark.

They'd laughed the whole way to Pacific Heights, the remnants of the sunset warm on Lawliet's face, and no one had even touched the stereo—but when they arrived, the house was dark.

Light almost scraped a bumper as he sent them flying up the drive, and Lawliet leapt out before he'd pulled the parking brake. The front door hung open, a window to nothing but black, and Light fumbled his gun from the holster, snapping off the safety as he crossed the threshold and stepped into a room he barely recognized.

The couch he'd slept on had been tipped over to bare the canvas on its underside, slashed from one corner to the opposite, and a standing lamp leaned against it, the tilted shade riddled with fissures. Throw pillows and scattered paperbacks littered the floor, joined in their jarring disarray by CD cases with the covers cracked, an end table sprawled by the torn curtains, and knickknacks from the mantle reduced to shards—

Lawliet was across the room, behind the couch, but his whisper could have been a scream.

"_No_."

The distance was endless, and Light took it in two strides.

Quillish lay facedown on the carpet, unmoving, his spectacles crushed into a tiny wreck of twisted frames and shattered glass not far away. Blood drenched his left shoulder, pooling beneath his frame—but it hadn't reached the carving knife he clenched in his right hand, which meant that the blood along its edge belonged to someone else.

Light wasn't breathing—and then stained fabric rose and fell, because Quillish very softly was.

Lawliet made a strangled sound, collapsing to his knees, touching the man's arm and then his matted hair before beckoning to Light to help to shift him.

Carefully, they rolled him over. He was bleeding steadily, but the bullet had missed everything vital—Quillish hadn't knifed his last homicidal maniac just yet.

The old man opened his eyes.

"They're gone," he rasped out on the second try, fingers tightening around the handle of the knife. "I—" His eyes flicked towards a scrap of paper that the blood had served to glue against his chest.

It offered nothing more or less than a city address.

"That's the warehouse," Lawliet murmured, and as the gray eyes lifted to meet Light's, they were colder than he'd ever thought possible.

"Go," Lawliet said.

Light's mind went numb. "But—"

"I can't leave him," Lawliet snapped, "and you've got a gun. _Go_."

Light scrambled to his feet and ran.

_

* * *

...sorry. Really sorry. Just remember that we had the fanservice last chapter, and this part was bound to come. XD I'm going to try to have a slightly faster update to resolve the cliffhanger, but I'm swamped in Real Life stuff, so I can't make any promises._

_Also, if you're about to tell me that there were no clues, I invite you go back and reread the fic, because all the pieces are there. And if you'd forgotten, the mystery plot is the work of the ever-fantastic Eltea. Only the UST and the filler are really mine. XD_

_B fans, please remember that B is not, strictly speaking, even a canon character, and I am under absolutely no obligation to include him in _any_ fic. Personally, I feel that it would have been disappointingly predictable if he'd been the killer here._

_Thank you all for sticking with this fic so far! :)_


	14. The Worst Idea Ever

_Author's Note: I was up until two-thirty Thursday night and three-thirty last night to get this sucker done—new record, guys!_

* * *

XIV. The Worst Idea Ever

The city was a dark, unfriendly labyrinth as Light raced heedlessly to the warehouse, fingers cramping where they were clenched too tight around the wheel.

Then again, it was probably a good thing he'd never sprung for a dashboard GPS.

_To stop a bloodthirsty mass-murderer turned kidnapper, please turn left in thirty feet._

_Twenty feet._

_Ten feet._

_Please proceed to kick some ass._

_It is advised that you try not to die in one of many available ways._

Then again, he could program it to speak to him in any accent he liked.

Thus it was that, as a cumulative ninety-eight percent of his mind focused on planning madly, suppressing panic, and navigating the treacherous topography of a city built entirely on hills, a tiny portion of him wondered what it would be like to have Lawliet's soft, smooth voice guiding him to his destination.

Light then realized that that was what the passenger seat was for.

In the meantime, his heart was multitasking, too—at once pounding wildly in his ears and throbbing in his throat, a tightening knot that made it increasingly difficult not to resort to hyperventilation to reduce the strain.

The city thinned as he neared the ill-lit, impressively secluded dock at the designated address. The warehouse rose from an old, abandoned pier—four stories of broken glass and corrugated steel, gray, black, and rusted brown in the anemic glow of the last few streetlamps that craned their necks to see. Stacks of crates and towers of barrels crowded boarded-up windows and shipping doors, sketching out a wonderland of ruthless industrial decay.

Light swallowed hard, striving to slow the thudding of his heart, flung his car into a vague approximation of a parking space on the street, and climbed out onto the creaking boards of the aging pier.

He snapped his cell phone open and hit his first speed-dial.

"Hey, what's u—"

"Matsuda," Light cut in, "come to Bosworth's warehouse as fast as you can. There's a box of chocolate in my desk—bring it here. And bring a gun."

_And a miracle, if you have one handy._

Matsuda's voice was sharp, and, distantly, Light heard objects clatter as the other man leapt to his feet and started to obey.

"You're there?"

"He's got the kids," Light explained, eyes narrowing as he plotted his route to the lit window on the second floor. "I'm going to reason with him as much as I can, but I need backup, and if he won't negotiate, we've got to give him what he wants."

There was a sound like something banging shut—but Light didn't know if it was a car door or a desk drawer, and he didn't know how long he'd have to stall.

"That's an amazingly bad idea," Matsuda managed to say.

"Might be my worst ever," Light agreed. "Suggestions welcome."

"Be _damn_ careful," Matsuda advised.

Light mustered up a small, thin smile. "Hurry," he said, and shut the phone.

Only the pools of weakened orange that lazed beneath the streetlamps guided him to the open doorway, a square of deeper darkness in the closest wall. Light's knuckles were white where he gripped his pistol, white again where he held his flashlight under the barrel with his other hand, and the bleak pallor of the tiny beam swung wildly as he crept willingly into Richard Bosworth's trap.

Yes, this was definitely the worst idea he had ever had.

Light set his jaw and struggled to map the room out in his mind—corners, crates, and chains; steel tables gleaming starkly when the flashlight struck their faces; haphazard piles of scrap metal scattered here and there. Bosworth knew this place, and Light didn't, and that put him at a disadvantage he knew he couldn't afford.

A staircase materialized in the dark, and he took it slowly, panning the flashlight back and forth until the brightness he'd seen from outside filled the hall and overwhelmed his contribution to the light.

He didn't dare to close his eyes, but he filled his chest with two deep, fortifying breaths before he stepped into the room where everything might go irreparably wrong.

The good news was that things weren't going to go irreparably wrong.

The bad news was that this was because they already _had_.

The first thing Light perceived when his eyes acclimated to the searing white was Matt and Near at the left wall—cowering against it, clinging to each other as if every lifeline in the world had snapped.

Their eyes were pleading and heartbreakingly hopeful, and the next thing Light saw was Mello, perched on one of those cold, industrial tables, curled up smaller than Light would have thought possible. Tear streaks striped his cheeks, and he had extended one trembling arm, pale fingers clutching a complicated mechanism that looked like…

"It's a detonator," Richard Bosworth remarked, idly admiring the way Mello's yellow hair parted around the black barrel of his semiautomatic .45.

Bosworth was an ordinary man—at least as far as appearances belied. His plainness had probably worked immensely to his advantage: he had a forgettable face, oval-shaped and unassuming, excepting only the keenness of his eyes, a feature Light remembered in painstaking detail from the cell phone photograph taken of their chase. Bosworth had a runner's build, which explained a bit more still, and his hair was an utterly average brown, the color flat and lifeless under the fluorescent bulb above.

"The funny thing," he mused, "is that I don't remember which detonator it _is_." He grinned. "Silly me."

Light was shaking simply from the effort of not bursting at the seams. "_What_—" he started to demand.

"Put the gun down, Yagami," Bosworth ordered, pushing on his own firearm until a softly-sobbing Mello bowed his head.

Light wanted to kill him. Light wanted to put a bullet through Richard Bosworth's forehead, wanted to watch blood bead out of the clean little hole, wanted to see the challenging intelligence fade from those sickeningly memorable eyes. Light wanted to watch the bastard die.

Instead, he slowly raised his hands, and then he slowly bent to set his pistol and his flashlight on the floor.

The latter rolled six inches away, presumably to spite him for a thousand nights spent locked in the glove compartment of his car.

"This is very simple," Bosworth told him pleasantly. "Mello here has his thumb on that little red button, and if he lets it go, _something_ is going to go sky-high. But that's the thing—I can't recall if that detonator goes with the charges I rigged up all around us, which are more than enough to level this place… or if it's the one that'll turn Quillish Wammy's house into a pile of rubble and dust."

Bosworth smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and the thing that frightened Light the most was that this madman looked perfectly sane.

"Fifty-fifty," was the conclusion, quiet, curious, and intent. "How do you like those odds?"

"I dropped my gun," Light replied, meeting the other man's gaze. "Get rid of yours."

"Show me the money, Yagami," Bosworth fired back. "Show me my fucking shipment and get me a ticket out of here, and Blondie gets off scot-free."

Light raised his hands again, palms out. "My partner has your chocolate," he said. "He's on his way, but I don't know how long it'll be before he gets here. Please stop pointing the gun at Mello's head, all right?"

Bosworth smiled again, genuinely amused. "You're not in much of a position to give orders, Officer," he pointed out.

"I'm not a threat," Light maintained. "Just stop pointing a loaded gun at a _child_."

"When is your partner due to arrive?" Bosworth inquired. "Shall we discuss my terms?"

Light gritted his teeth and held his tongue. "What terms are those?"

"I want what's left of my goddamn chocolate," Bosworth responded, "and time to go pack up everything I have at home. And then I want to be well out of the country before anyone tries to follow me."

"Fine," Light spat. "Will you put the gun down?"

Bosworth actually laughed, the barrel shifting against Mello's skull and setting the boy to trembling anew. "Has anyone ever told you that you have a one-track mind?"

"We'll give you what you're asking for," Light repeated. "Just _put the gun down_."

"You can quit it with the broken-record talk-me-down routine," Bosworth informed him with an infuriating calm. "We both know the gun is the only reason you're listening to me now—and the only reason you're going to let me get away."

"He's a _kid_," Light insisted. "Point it at me. I'll still be listening."

"Ah, to have more hands," Bosworth sighed, smirking, as he curled the fingers of his left one in Mello's hair, garnering a whimper and a darting of pale blue eyes. "He'll be fine as long as you help me out."

Light wanted to help him out of the atmosphere and watch his asphyxiate in the vacuum of space.

Or help him into a wood-chipper.

That would be a sufficiently fantastically horrible way to die.

"Hasn't he been through enough?" Light demanded. "He's terrified, which seems to be one of your primary objectives. Does victimizing children make you feel powerful, Bosworth?"

"No," the man answered idly. "But your frustration does."

Light was really, really hoping he would get the chance to shoot this asshole in the kneecap.

And, if he was lucky, in a few more places than that.

Before he could develop a checklist, he heard cautious footsteps on the stair behind.

"Hi," Matsuda said, sidling carefully into the room, holding a familiar white box in both hands. "What'd I miss?"

Bosworth's eyes were on the box, and his grip on his gun tightened. "I was hoping you'd be reasonable," he noted. "I've been telling Officer Yagami about my conditions. It would be lovely if you'd put any and all weapons on the ground by his."

"I'm not armed," Matsuda assured him cheerfully, settling one hand under the box to bear its weight and raising the other as he turned in a circle for inspection. "See?"

The box had not been that heavy when Light had tossed it into his desk.

Bingo.

"Near," he blurted out, "your nose—!"

The boy immediately clapped his hair-twirling hand over it, and Matt seized the other anxiously, looking close.

"What?" he prompted, squeezing Near's defenseless wrist. "What about your nose? What's wrong?"

Mutely Near shook his head, and Bosworth glanced over, impatience in every line of his pose.

"What, is he bleeding? He looks fine. As I was—"

Light waved a dismissive hand and started towards Near.

"_Stop_!" Bosworth barked. "Don't _move_—"

"I'm not armed," Light reminded him, crossing the room to Matt and Near. "Chill."

Matsuda made a discontented noise and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like "Please never say that again."

"_Don't move_!" Bosworth repeated, louder and with an edge of hysteria, and out of the corner of one eye, Light confirmed that the man was swinging his pistol back and forth, torn between Mello and Light, incapable of targeting them both.

"It's fine—" Light began again.

"_STOP_!" Bosworth roared, bolstering the gun with both hands to aim it directly at Light's head.

Light stopped and cautiously lifted his hands in surrender.

Bosworth gave him one last glare and shifted to turn his attention back to Mello.

A gunshot rent the air, earth-shattering in the confines of the room, and Light hit the deck.

He scrambled to his feet, ears still ringing, head like a carousel, even as Bosworth's handgun spiraled down and clattered dully to the floor, its screaming owner clutching desperately at the torrent of blood that spurted from his arm.

Matsuda, best marksman in the office for five years running, lowered the pistol he'd hidden in the chocolates' box, having nailed Bosworth's elbow spot-on—presumably shattering bone and snapping tendons like so much kindling. Light really didn't give a shit about the details as long as Bosworth was in a _lot _of pain.

Mello slipped off the table and scuttled to take cover behind his savior's legs, still clinging to the detonator to keep the button carefully depressed, strands of blond hair sticking to the tear trails on his cheeks.

Light barely had time to enjoy the geyser of blood emanating from his enemy before Bosworth spun on his heel and ran.

Matsuda's jaw dropped, but before he could muster any words, Light snatched his own standard issue semiautomatic from the floor, cement scraping greedily at his fingertips, and gave chase.

"_Light_!" Matsuda yelled after just a second's delay—but by that time, Light had shouldered through a curtain of ripped plastic and disappeared into the dark.

Bosworth had taken to the stairs—over the echoes of Matsuda's shout, Light detected the thumping of footfalls and the wheezing of ragged breath, and he raced towards them at a heedless full tilt.

The protests of his own body were so distant that they might have belonged to someone else. His heart pounded fit to shatter his ribcage, but the adrenaline drowned everything in uncanny lucidity—a clarity so complete that his adjusting eyes picked out logos on the crates, patches of rust on the grotesque shapes of looming machines, gradations of dark to darker all around. None of that mattered; nothing did, except that Richard Bosworth was _not going to get away_.

He had, however, somehow gone quiet. Light couldn't fathom how it was even possible given the man's current state, but the next floor of the warehouse was one vast room draped in the sort of silence reserved for horror movie crypts.

Horror movie crypts and awkward family moments in front of people you had been hoping to impress.

Light's index finger curled around the trigger. He was vaguely aware of the clamminess of his left palm where it anchored his right wrist, but both his hands were steady and still.

He took one step forward, then another, the dimness giving way to heaps of bent steel and broken circuitry, tangled wires spilling everywhere. Only the faintest hint of streetlamp orange reached him through the cracked window with its drifting plastic shade. There was enough assorted junk here to build a dozen computers from the parts, but the one thing Light couldn't find was the man who'd put it here.

From behind him came the rattling jingle of thick, thick chains.

Light whirled, gun extended, hearing his heartbeat gallop to keep pace, but there was nothing but the dark—the dark, and the gently-swinging chains, sinister hooks dangling at their ends.

Very, very belatedly, Light realized that he'd voluntarily trapped himself in an poorly-lit room with a mass-murdering psychopath.

On the upside, he had the gun.

Plastic met plastic off to his right, and Light spun again—just in time to have a strobe light flashed in his face.

Howling, blind, Light stumbled backwards, flinging one hand over his eyes, knowing better than to drop the gun—

Bosworth barreled into him, the force of the man's weight colliding with his chest hard enough to make him sympathize with vehicle crash test barriers, and they both went sprawling to the floor. Something that might have been a clenched fist slammed down on his wrist, and the gun popped out of his fingers and skittered away.

Hot blood was oozing all over Light from Bosworth's ruined right arm, and he scrabbled wildly to get out from under his adversary, whose good hand was fumbling for his throat. Light brought his knee up, jamming it into Bosworth's stomach, earning a gasp, a wet cough, and a feebler assault, and a proper shove sent Bosworth rolling off of him and into a pile of crates. Boards split at the sudden pressure, and Light leapt on the opportunity and on his opponent, pressing Bosworth into the dust, struggling to hold down all four limbs at once—

At least there weren't any serial-killing octopuses. _Christ_.

Flailing, Bosworth caught a hefty sliver of the broken crate and buried its jagged tip in Light's right side.

Biting back a cry and fighting off the agony, Light shoved the heel of his hand directly into Bosworth's gunshot wound.

He thought his eardrums would shatter at the screech the man unleashed, and he grimly crushed his hand down a little harder still.

With a cornered tiger's final burst of strength, Bosworth heaved him off, and Light tumbled to the dusty floor, hands slick with both of their blood. His quarry melted into the shadows, uneven steps and raspy breaths betraying another retreat up another flight of stairs.

For a moment, all Light heard was Bosworth's ungainly exit and his own panting breath as he lay dazed on the floor, the dry air scouring at his throat.

Then he detected a subtler sound—a voice from the story below, a voice that was calling out his name.

Some small miracle saw fit to intervene, guiding Light's fingers onto the barrel of his gun. He curled them around it and made his decision—he'd rushed headlong into a dark room, grappled like a wildcat, and been staked like an anatomically-backwards vampire as his reward. They'd cornered Bosworth at the top of his complex, and now it was time to fall back and let the SWAT team do their job.

It was only fair; those guys got paid a _lot_.

Light peeled himself off of the floor and staggered down the stairs.

—

The adrenaline was fading now. In a battered, bloodied haze, Light let Lawliet drag him back to the makeshift base camp that had sprung up around his car—which he leaned against, knees quaking, as they waited for reinforcements to arrive.

Lawliet was squeezing the life out of Light's mortifyingly filthy hand, and they joined a trembling but brave-faced Mello, the detonator button still secure beneath his small, pale thumb. The bomb squad was on their way, Lawliet explained, the medics not far behind, and SWAT officers would join them any moment now.

Light focused on not touching his injury, as his palms were still smeared with Bosworth's blood—and God only knew what _he'd_ been shooting up.

Light was so relieved—and filled with such a bone-deep contentment—as he watched Matsuda comforting Matt and Near (whose button nose was utterly unscathed), as Lawliet and Quillish manned one of Mello's shoulders each, that at first he automatically dismissed the small red dot that flickered on his pants leg and wavered just an inch.

Then it jumped up to his chest and settled over his heart, and frigid cords of terror tightened around every part of him.

Slowly, Light looked up.

In the highest window of the warehouse, he could just make out the shadow of Bosworth cradling a sniper rifle, and there was no doubt of what was in his sights.

_No no no oh God no _please_—_

A streak of movement snatched his attention—Lawliet, who jerked the detonator out of Mello's hand.

The warehouse exploded into a solid wall of red and orange flame.

The shock wave made short work of Light's weak knees, and it deafened him for good measure—he watched from the ground as, in perfect silence, the building collapsed, steel rippling like mercury as concrete and supportive architecture crumpled into the pier. Salt-warped boards, further compromised by the raging fire, couldn't sustain the weight, and Light's hearing gradually returned in time for him to bear witness to the rumbling finale as the shreds of Bosworth's headquarters crumbled into the sea.

Lawliet was gasping out something about Richard Bosworth not being a man who planned ahead, about how he would have had to rig the house when the chocolate was still there, about how many charges he would have had to tow up to Pacific Heights and install without being seen, and a thousand other things that made no difference now.

Light gathered himself to his feet, grabbed Lawliet's arm, and kissed him to shut him up.

Lawliet made a sound like "_Mmf_," and then a sound like, "_Mmm_."

"Holy shit," a small voice said.

"_Mello_," Quillish warned.


	15. Sound Advice

_Author's Note: Sorry that it's so late—the first week of school was only three days, but it still kicked my sorry ass, and then my computer decided to malfunction so badly that I don't even want to bore you with the details. Then the second week of school decided to kick my ass even more! XD The fact that there's a chapter at all we owe, of course, to Eltea, who lent me her old computer until mine miraculously changed its mind. XD_

_Other than that… thank you all for reading this far and enjoying the fic. :) (If you haven't enjoyed it but have still read this far, I'm not sure what to tell you… XD) I've had a fantastic time with it, and you've all been great._

_That said, if you don't dig it when a fic ends with a big pile of fluff, you should probably close the window immediately and find something else to do. XD_

_But yes. An immeasurable thank you to Eltea, a massive one to Jenwryn as well, and a saluting one to you, dear reader. :D_

* * *

Chapter XV. Sound Advice

Light had been having a quiet, pleasant dream when he was awakened by a slightly tinny burst of music.

"_He's all that—he's all that I wanted, he's all that I needed, he's all that I have; my baby, he's all that—he gives me this feeling, he makes me believe it, and my love never ends—"_

Light supposed that cheesy dance-pop was a step up from techno when it came to Lawliet's ringtone.

Maybe.

A half-step.

Well, it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever woken up to. He'd been to _college_, after all.

Lawliet's hand, fumbling on the bedside table, finally grabbed the phone, which he brought to his ear.

"Good morning, Matsuda," he mumbled.

Light was going to kill his partner as soon as it was no longer eight-thirty in the morning on a Sunday.

Lawliet was listening intently to the dead man on the other end of the line. "Yes, that would be the plan." He paused. "Yes, I am in bed… Yes, but I don't see what difference… Yes, it was a 'long night'; we took the boys to the movie theater, and Mello got Mountain Dew at the soda machine while we weren't looking… I sincerely doubt that that is 'what they all say,' Matsuda; I find it difficult to believe that all of 'them' have made the tremendously wonderful error of adopting three teenaged children… I know it's a figure of speech; I just think it's a misleading… On the contrary, I think I'm a lot of fun… Yes, I imagine that Light-kun _would_ know."

It was as this point that Light stopped grinning to himself and started wishing he hadn't overheard a word of this conversation.

"Yes, all right. We will see you then. Goodbye."

"I'm going to murder that man," Light decided as Lawliet set the phone aside.

"I should hate to have to arrest you for justifiable homicide," Lawliet replied, squirming across the empty patch of the bed to curl up with Light, who had no objections whatsoever to this event. "Perhaps we should murder him together and go on the run."

Light ruffled Lawliet's hair, a process which was entirely pointless but rather enjoyable nonetheless. A drowsy Lawliet repossessed his hand and started mouthing warmly at his knuckles.

Lawliet had a vaguely unnerving tendency to chew on his finally-official boyfriend if he hadn't had breakfast.

Not that Light minded at all.

Furthermore, he had only just begun to favor Lawliet's swanlike neck with sloppy morning kisses when someone pounded on the door.

"I heard voices!" Mello called. "Have you both got pants on?"

As a matter of pure habit, Light and Lawliet glanced down at themselves and then at each other. Light was wearing a tee-shirt and plaid drawstring pants, and Lawliet had on his white flannel pajamas with the ice cream cone motif.

For a long time, Light had been dying to know where Lawliet had found pajamas like that in a size to fit a fully-grown male, and then he had remembered the existence of the internet.

"Yes," was Lawliet's unwise answer to Mello's question, an answer which sent the door banging open and brought a familiar procession of children bursting into the room.

Mello made a beeline for the bed and leapt heedlessly onto it, aiming for the miniscule space between Lawliet and Light.

Only desperately fast reflexes saved Light's ribcage from a great deal of irreparable damage.

Mello bounced contentedly as Near climbed up onto the foot of the bed, where Matt immediately joined him.

"I can't believe you're still in bed!" Mello was exclaiming. "We're having a _party_!"

"Not for another three and a quarter hours, Mello," Lawliet reminded him.

"So?" Mello prompted. "That's not that long!"

"Mello," Light cut in, "you know that you're only allowed to have one bowl of Cocoa Puffs. The next one has to be Cheerios."

Mello stopped bouncing to maximize the efficiency of his puppy eyes. "Just this once? We're having a _party_!"

"A fact of which Light-kun and I are acutely aware," Lawliet confirmed, getting out of the bed and rubbing at his eyes with the back of his wrist. "Why don't we find something that you three can do to help prepare?"

Mello catapulted off the bed and was the first one out the door, Matt and Near trailing, Lawliet ushering them all towards the kitchen, and then everything went remarkably quiet.

Light spread out on the empty bed, stretching, and passed a hand over the spot of warmth where Lawliet had been. He smiled, shook his head, and dragged himself off of the mattress in search of something to wear.

—

Three and a half hours of clearing dishes, hastily dusting the mantel and its disregarded kin, stocking the refrigerator, letting the boys go wild with paper streamers, and greeting the incoming guests later, they had a house full of cops and children.

Light was not entirely sure whether this was a monumental success or sufficient cause to fling oneself out a second-story window.

Possibly both.

In either case, everyone was armed with soda cans and snack food, and the adults occupied the living room couches while Matt, Mello, and Near regaled Yumi and the baby with their block-building prowess. As Matsuda launched into the story of the artistically-gifted vandals who had signed their names beneath every tag hoping that a talent scout would happen by, Mogi caught Light's sleeve and pulled him into the hallway.

Light was waiting for "Sorry to break it to you, but this party sucks more than spending Christmas in the office"—and Light would know—but that wasn't what Mogi said.

"I'm sure you've thought of this…" He glanced back at the room, then tugged Light a little further down the hall. "But… be careful with him."

Light blinked.

Ever the height of brilliance, he eventually managed, "What?"

"Lawliet," Mogi told him gently. "He doesn't really know anything about relationships, practically speaking, because he's never had one, but he thinks he knows everything—which makes it even more important that you keep an eye out. He's too proud to admit it, too, and I can't imagine him sitting you down for a heart-to-heart if something was going wrong."

Light attempted to conjure the mental image, but it proved about as elusive as a slept-in morning with Mello in the house.

Light maintained confidence, however, in the fact that Lawliet was an extremely fast learner.

"It's not that I don't trust you, Light," Mogi added, a better compliment than he probably knew; "but you could _wreck_ him. What I mean is—tread lightly."

That just wasn't _fair_.

Light mustered a smile. "I see your point, and… I will. Thank you."

Mogi beamed back. "Good. Otherwise, I might have to knock some sense into you, and they'd probably never find all the pieces."

_That_ Light could imagine.

Mogi clapped his shoulder with just enough raw power to reinforce the thought, and Light swallowed a wince. As they returned to the festivities, he wondered who exactly had nominated Kanzo Mogi as the office's relationship guru—and how the _hell_ they'd known that it would work.

"Easiest arrest we've ever made," Matsuda was announcing smugly. "Other than the eighteen-year-old crime of passion arsonist who went all Tell-Tale Gasoline Can and turned himself in."

As if to punctuate the statement, Mello went on his tip-toes to lay a final block on top of his precarious tower.

It teetered, and then it fell.

On Near.

Yumi squeaked in dismay, both hands over her mouth, and Near rubbed ruefully at his head, looking depressingly accustomed to this type of abuse.

Quillish handed him a cookie.

"Why don't you go play outside?" he suggested. "Do any of you have your cell phones?"

"I have mine!" Matt piped up eagerly. "I set it to ring to the Tetris theme song! You wanna hear?"

In a rush of pattering feet serenaded by a very distinctive tune emanating from the phone—and from Matt as he sang along—the quartet vanished out the front door.

Light was going to have the Tetris theme stuck in his head for at least two weeks.

Lawliet was standing with his hands in his pockets, contentedly watching the way the kids had gone.

"It is always wise," he noted idly, "to date a man who makes good cookies."

Matsuda stroked his chin. "That's… actually very sound advice."

"Take it to heart," Naomi agreed. "And to stomach."

"Amen," Eriko solemnly remarked.

Satisfied with the consensus, Lawliet selected another cookie and crammed it into his mouth.

The Aizawas' youngest daughter, who had lately come to terms with the concept of crawling across the floor, made short work of the carpet and started tugging at Light's pants leg.

"Cookies aside," Matsuda mused, "I hope Lawliet doesn't get jealous of your popularity with the ladies, Light."

The baby put the captured fistful of fabric in her mouth.

"Or not," Matsuda amended brightly.

—

A game of Trivial Pursuit was in full swing (and it _was_ swinging, because every person in the room had commentary for every question—and because everyone had agreed that Light, Lawliet, and Quillish had to be on different teams for anyone else to stand a chance) when they heard a sound from the front hall that sent tremors of trepidation rippling down Light's spine.

It was Mello, Matt, and Yumi laughing gleefully.

Light was assessing the major likelihoods—they had decorated all the cars in the driveway with toilet paper; they had tied Near to a tree and left him there; they had jumped fully-clothed into the neighbors' swimming pool—when all four of the children turned the corner and entered the room.

Near was holding a small, fluffy, slightly disheveled cream-colored puppy, which was pawing at his collar and licking at his cheek, and the others looked absolutely ecstatic.

"Can we keep him?" Matt and Mello cried at top volume.

"Absolutely not," Light said—at the exact same moment that Lawliet beamed and answered, "Of course you can."

They shared a look, and Lawliet offered a pleading face that rivaled even Near's.

Matsuda giggled. "It's good-cop, bad-cop," he pointed out.

Everyone else in the room was staring at Light like he had put the puppy in a trashcan and dragged it out to the curb.

Sighing, he glanced at Quillish, who shrugged and smiled.

Light turned to the boys.

"As long as I don't have to feed it," he said.

—

Two weeks later, Light poured kibble into the bowl and leaned against the counter, nursing his coffee cup as the dog went at her breakfast with gusto.

For of course she was a _she_.

The vet who had given her all the necessary shots hadn't had a clue what kind of dog she was, so they didn't know how big she was going to get—though she was certainly working on "of a size to devour burglars," which Light supposed wasn't really a bad thing—and the boys had named her Wammy so that, as a member of Quillish's household, her official title would be "Double Wammy."

Light called her Double Trouble.

And, privately, Puppyface.

The latter was really only because "Sweetie Pie" and "Cupcake" were expressly reserved for when he wanted to drive Lawliet insane.

Lawliet had a tendency to address him as "Snookums-kun" until he stopped.

Damn that crafty, crafty man.

Puppyface finished doing her ravenous wolf impression and sat up to stare at him imploringly.

"Not a chance," Light told her. "The way Matt sneaks you biscuits, you're going to get fat even without my help."

Puppyface composed her namesake into the most mournful expression Light had ever seen.

Light resisted her considerable powers of persuasion—though he did crouch down and scratch behind her ears.

He was only human, after all.

A familiar cadence of _tatt_ing on the floor in the hall heralded the entrance of a certain dark-haired, bleary-eyed individual who had last been seen holding a pillow over his head while Light's alarm blared.

Light grinned. "'Morning, sunshine."

"'Morning, sunlight," Lawliet mumbled back.

The cheater.

Lawliet proceeded to the mug cabinet—the mugs had required one all to themselves since Light had contributed his collection—and fumbled amongst its denizens, ending up with a specimen that read, _I take it black, like my mood until I've had some_.

Light smiled over the rim of his, which advised him to _Be loved_.

While the water boiled, Lawliet wandered over and settled his chin on Light's shoulder.

Light fluffed his hair a little more, and Lawliet retaliated by stretching up to his full height and starting to chew, lick at, and suck on various parts of Light's ear.

Light's knees went very wobbly, and he steadied himself against the countertop, rightfully concerned that his coffee mug might slip right out of his hand.

L made losing so much fun.

"You're traumatizing the dog," Light managed, the statement sounding much less forceful and convincing than he would have liked.

"She's not traumatized," Lawliet murmured, his breath hot and moist against Light's neck. He took a moment to glance over for consultation. "Are you, Double Wammy?"

Puppyface wagged her tail.

—

The strange thing about coming to work now was that it was like Aizawa had said—it was impossible not to worry when you'd seen both sides of the world; when you knew the marvelous as well as the mortifying, and you knew how much of the former the latter threatened every day.

But, somehow, being conscious of the stakes made all of it that much more worthwhile.

Another benefit of the new arrangement of Light's life was that, at 8:59, Lawliet grabbed his tie and dragged him in for a kiss before they parted for their respective desks.

"All enthusiastic making out should be relegated to the downstairs office," Aizawa declared as he walked past them, "as part of the hazing process for the interns."

Matsuda just clapped Light's shoulder in an approving way.

Eventually, of course, Light had to sit down at his workspace and get down to business, but the rest of his Monday really didn't look too bad.

He laid his briefcase on the desk and cracked it open, and on top of all the neatly-ordered, meticulously-alphabetized case files, there lay a single piece of candy.

It was a Valentine's Day Dove chocolate.

Light looked both ways, struggling not to blush, and then leaned down to inspect it a little more closely. The wrapper was wrinkled—almost as if someone had carefully removed it and put it back.

Light unfolded it, cocooning the chocolate in a Kleenex to save it for later, and flattened out the foil.

It read, _Chocolate always loves you back_.

Or it would have, if someone hadn't scribbled out the "Choco" and the "ate."

Light's cheeks were very warm now, and his heart was a little warmer still. He taped the wrapper to the side of his computer monitor and bent to his work grinning.

Yes, it was going to be a very good day.

_

* * *

That the bookstores divide into romance and mystery suggests the two most powerful fantasies are someone to love and someone to blame._

—James Richardson


End file.
